PR . 

5259 

1 871 



THE 



QUEEN OF THE AIR 



A STUDY OF THE GREEK MYTHS 



CLOUD AND STORM. 



ET 

JOHN RUSKIN, LL.D. 
«t£«d3HSF19VlS3 




NEW YORK: 

JOHN WILEY & SON, PUBLISHERS, 

15 Astok El ace. 

1871. 












The New York Printing Company, 

8i, 83, avJSs Centre Street, 

New York. 



TRANS FflB 
®» O. PUBLIC LIBRARY 
SEPT. IO, 104O 



PREFACE. 



My days and strength have lately been much broken ; 
and I never more felt the insufficiency of both than 
in preparing for the press the following desultory mem- 
oranda on a most noble subject. But I leave them 
now as they stand, for no time nor labour would be 
enough to complete them to my contentment ; and I 
believe that they contain suggestions which may be 
followed with safety, by persons who are beginning to 
take interest in the aspects of mythology, which only 
recent investigation has removed from the region of 
conjecture into that of rational inquiry. I have some 
advantage, also, from my field work, in the interpretation 
of myths relating to natural phenomena ; and I have 
had always near me, since we were at college together, a 
sure, and unweariedly kind, guide, in my friend Charles 
Newton, to whom we owe the finding of more treasure in 



IV PEEFA( E. 

mines of marble, than, were it rightly estimated, all 
California could buy. I must not, however, permit the 
chance of his name being in any wise associated with my 
errors. Much of my work has been done obstinately in 
my own way ; and he is never responsible for me, though 
he has often kept me right, or at least enabled me to ad- 
vance in a right direction. Absolutely right no one can 
be in such matters ; nor does a day pass without convin- 
cing every honest student of antiquity of some partial 
error, and showing him better how to think, and where 
to look. But I knew that there was no hope of my being 
able to enter with advantage on the fields of history 
opened by the splendid investigation of recent philolo- 
gists ; though I could qualify myself, by attention and 
sympathy, to understand here and there, a verse of 
Homer's or Hesiod's, as the simple people did- for whom 
they sang. 

Even while I correct these sheets for press, a lecture by 
Professor Tyndall has been put into my hands, which I 
ought to have heard last 16th of January, but was hin- 
dered by mischance; and which, I now find, completes, 
in two important particulars, the evidence of an instinc- 
tive truth in ancient symbolism ; showing, first, that the 
Greek conception of an setherial element pervading space 



is justified by the closest reasoning of modern physicists ; 
and, secondly, that the blue of the sky, hitherto thought 
to be caused by watery vapour, is, indeed, reflected from 
the divided air itself; so that the bright blue of the eyes 
of Athena, and the deep blue of her aegis, prove to be ac- 
curate mythic expressions of natural phenomena which 
it is an uttermost triumph of recent science to have 
revealed. 

Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine triumph more 
complete. To form, "within an experimental tube, a 
bit of more perfect sky than the sky itself ! " here is 
magic of the finest sort ! singularly reversed from that 
of old time, which only asserted its competency to en- 
close in bottles elemental forces that were — not of the 
sky. 

Let me, in thanking Professor Tyndall for the true 
wonder of this piece of work, ask his pardon, and that 
of all masters in physical science, for any words of mine, 
either in the following pages or elsewhere, that may ever 
seem to fail in the respect due to their great powers of 
thought, or in the admiration due to the far scope of their 
discovery. But I will be judged by themselves, if I have 
not bitter reason to ask them to teach us more than yet 
they have taught. 



This first day of May, 1869, I am writing where my 
work was begun ihirtv-frvc years ago, — within sight of 
the .-now- of the higher Alps. In that half of the permit- 
ted life of man, I have seen strange evil brought upon 
every scene that I best loved, or tried to make beloved by 
others. The light which once flushed those pale summits 
with its rose at dawn, and purple at sunset, is now 
umbered and faint ; the air which once inlaid the clefts 
of all their golden crags with azure, is now defiled with 
languid coils of smoke, belched from worse than volcanic 
fires ; their very glacier waves are ebbing, and their 
snows fading, as if Hell had breathed on them ; the 
waters that once sank at their feet into crystalline rest, are 
now dimmed and foul, from deep to deep, and shore to 
shore. These are no careless words — they are accurately — 
horribly — true. I know what the Swiss lakes were ; no 
pool of Alpine fountain at its source was clearer. This 
morning, on the Lake of Geneva, at half a mile from 
the beach, I could scarcely see my oar-blade a fathom 
deep. 

The light, the air, the waters, all defiled ! How of the 
earth itself ? Take this one fact for type of honour done by 
the modern Swiss to the earth of his native land. There 
used to be a little rock at the end of the avenue by the 



port of Neuchatel ; there, the last marble of the foot of 
Jura, sloping to the blue water, and (at this time of year) 
covered with bright pink tufts of Saponaria. I went, 
three days since, to gather a blossom at the place. The 
goodly native rock and its flowers were covered with the 
dust and refuse of the town ; but, in the middle of the 
avenue, was a newly-constructed artificial rockery, with a 
fountain twisted through a spinning spout, and an in- 
scription on one of its loose-tumbled stones, — 

"Aux Botanistes, 
Le club Jurassique." 

Ah, masters of modern science, give me back my 
Athena oat of your vials, and seal, if it may be, once 
more, Asmodeus therein. Tou have divided the ele- 
ments, and united them ; enslaved them upon the 
earth, and discerned them in the stars. Teach us, 
now, but this of them, which is all that man need 
know,— that the Air is given to him for his life ; and 
the Bain to his thirst, and for his baptism ; and the 
Fire for warmth ; and the Sun for sight ; and the 
Earth for his meat — and his Rest. 

Vevat, May 1, 1869. 



THE QUEEN OF THE AIR 



i. 

ATHENA CHALINI.TIS* 

(Athena in the Heavens.) 

Lecture on the Greek Myths of Storm, given {partly) in University Col- 
lege, London, March 9th, 1869 . 

1. I will not ask your pardon for endeavouring to interest 
you in the subject of Greek Mythology ; but I must ask 
your permission to approach it in a temper differing from 
that in which it is frequently treated. "We cannot justly 
interpret the religion of any people, unless we are prepared 
"to admit that we ourselves, as well as they, are liable to 
error in matters of faith ; and that the convictions of others, 
however singular, may in some points have been well 
founded, while our own, however reasonable, may in some 
particulars be mistaken. You must forgive me, therefore, 
for not always distinctively calling the creeds of the past 
"superstition," and the creeds of the present day "reli- 
gion ; " as well as for assuming that a faith now confessed 
may sometimes be superficial, and that a faith long for- 
gotten may once have been sincere. It is the task of the 

* "Athena the Restrainer. " The name is given to her as having 
helped Bellerophon to bridle Pegasus, the flying cloud. 



2 THE Ql EEN OF THE AIR. 

Divine to condemn the errors of antiquity, and of the Phi- 
lologist to account for them : I will only pray you to read, 
with patience, and humau sympathy, the thoughts of men 
who lived without blame in a darkness they could not dis- 
pel ; and to remember that, whatever charge of folly may 
justly attach to the saying, — "There is no God," the 
folly is prouder, deeper, and less pardonable, in saying, 
" There is no God but for me." 

2. A Myth, in its simplest definition, is a story with a 
meaning attached to it, other than it seems to have at first ; 
and the fact that it has such a meaning is generally mark- 
ed by some of its circumstances being extraordinary, or, in 
the common use of the word, unnatural. Thus, if I tell 
you that Hercules killed a water-serpent in the lake of Ler- 
na, and if I mean, and you understand, nothing more than 
that fact, the story, whether true or false, is not a myth. 
.But if by telling you this, I mean that Hercules purified 
the stagnation of many streams from deadly miasmata, my 
story, however simple, is a true myth ; only, as, if I left it 
in that simplicity, you would probably look for nothing be- 
yond, it will be wise in me to surprise your attention by 
adding some singular circumstance ; for instance, that the 
water-snake had several heads, which revived as fast as 
they were killed, and which poisoned even the foot that 
trode upon them as they slept. And in proportion to the 
fulness of intended meaning I shall probably multiply and 
refine upon these improbabilities ; as, suppose, if, instead 
of desiring only to tell you that Hercules purified a marsh, 
I wished you to understand that he contended with the 



ATHENA IN THE HEAVENS. 6 

venom and vapour of envy and evil ambition, whether in 
other men's souls or in his own, and choked that malaria 
only by supreme toil, — I might tell, you that this serpent 
was formed by the Goddess whose pride was in the trial 
of Hercules ; and that its place of abode was by a palm- 
tree ; and that for every head of it that was cut off, two 
rose up with renewed life ; and that the hero found at last 
he could not kill the .creature at all by cutting its heads 
off or crushing them ; but only by burning them down ; 
and that the midmost of them could not be killed even 
that way, but had to be buried alive. Only in proportion 
as I mean more, I shall certainly appear more absurd in 
my statement ; and at last, when I get unendurably sig- 
nificant, all practical persons will agree that I was talking 
mere nonsense from the beginning, and never meant 
anything at all. 

3. It is just possible, however, also, that the story-teller 
may all along have meant nothing but what he said ; and 
that, incredible as the events may appear, he himself liter- 
ally believed — and expected you also to believe — all this 
about Hercules, without any latent moral or history what- 
ever. And it is very necessary, in reading traditions of 
this kind, to determine, first of all, whether you are listen- 
ing to a simple person, who is relating what, at all events, 
he believes to be true (and may, therefore, possibly have 
been so to some extent), or to a reserved philosopher, who 
is veiling a theory of the universe under the grotesque of 
a fairy tale. It is, in general, more likely that the first 
supposition should be the right one: — simple and credu- 



4 THE QUEEN OF THE AIR. 

Ions persons are, perhaps fortunately, more common than 
philosophers: and it is of the highest importance that yon 
should take their innocent testimony as it was meant, and 
not efface, under the graceful explanation which your 
cultivated ingenuity may suggest, either the evidence their 
story may contain (such as it is worth) of an extraordinary 
event having really taken place, or the unquestionable 
light which it will cast upon the character of the person 
by whom it was frankly believed. And to deal with Greek 
religion honestly, you must at once understand that this 
literal belief was, in the mind of the general people, as 
deeply rooted as ours in the legends of our own sacred 
book ; and that a basis of unmiraculous event was as little 
suspected, and an explanatory symbolism as rarely traced, 
by them, as by us. 

Tou must, therefore, observe that I deeply degrade the 
position which such a myth as that just referred to occu- 
pied in the Greek mind, by comparing it (for fear of offend- 
ing you) to our story of St. George and the Dragon. Still, 
the analogy is perfect in minor respects; and though it 
fails to give you any notion of the vitally religious earnest- 
ness of the Greek faith, it will exactly illustrate the man- 
ner in which faith laid hold of its objects. 

4. This story of Hercules and the Hydra, then, was to 
the general Greek mind, in its best days, a tale about a 
real hero and a real monster. Not one in a thousand knew 
anything of the way in which the story had arisen, any 
more than the English peasant generally is aware of the 
plebeian origin of St. George ; or supposes that there were 



ATHENA IN THE HEAVENS. 5 

once alive in the world, with sharp teeth and claws, real, 
and very ugly, flying dragons. On the other hand, few 
persons traced any moral or symbolical meaning in the 
story, and the average Greek was as far from imagining 
any interpretation like that I have just given you, as an 
average Englishman is from seeing in St. George the Red 
Cross Knight of Spenser, or in the Dragon the Spirit of 
Infidelity. But, for all that, there was a certain under- 
current of consciousness in all ■ minds, that the figures 
meant more than they at first showed ; and, according to 
each man's own faculties of sentiment, he judged and read 
tliem ; just as a Knight of the Garter reads more in the 
jewel on his collar than the George and Dragon of a 
public-house expresses to the host or to his customers. 
Thus, to the mean person the myth always meant little ; 
to the noble person, much : and the greater their famili- 
arity with it, the more contemptible it became to the one, 
and the more sacred to the other : until vulgar commenta- 
tors explained it entirely away, while Virgil made it the 
crowning glory of his choral hymn to Hercules : 

" Around thee, powerless to infect thy soul, 
Rose, in his crested crowd, the Lerna worm." 

"Non te rationis egentem 
Lernseus turba capitum circumstetit anguis." 

And although, in any special toil of the hero's life, the 
moral interpretation was rarely with definiteness attached 
to its event, yet in the whole course of the life, not only a 
symbolical meaning, but the warrant for the existence of 



G THE QUEEN OF THE AIR. 

a real spiritual power, was apprehended of all men. Her- 
cules was ii" dead hero, to be remembered only as a victor 
over monsters of the pasl — harmless now, as slain. He 
was the perpetual type and mirror of heroism, and its pre- 
sent and living aid against every ravenous form of human 
trial and pain. 

5. But, if we seek to know more than this, and to ascer- 
tain the manner in which the story first crystallized into 
its shape, we shall find ourselves led back generally to 
one or other of two sources — either to actual historical 
events, represented by the fancy under figures person i ly- 
ing them ; or else to natural phenomena similarly endowed 
with life by the imaginative power, usually more or less 
under the influence of terror. The historical myths we 
must leave the masters of history to follow; they, and the 
events they record, being yet involved in great, though 
attractive and penetrable, mystery. But the stars, and 
hills, and storms are with us now, as they were with others 
of old ; and it only needs that we look at them with the 
earnestness of those childish eyes to understand the first 
words spoken of them by the children of men. And then, 
in all the most beautiful and enduring myths, we shall 
find, not only a literal story of a real person, — not only a 
parallel imagery of moral principle, — but an underlying 
worship of natural phenomena, out of which both have 
sprung, and in which both for ever remain rooted. Thus, 
from the real sun, rising and setting; — from the real 
atmosphere, calm in its dominion of unfading blue, and 
fierce in its descent of tempest, — the Greek forms first the 



ATHENA m THE HEAVENS. 7 

idea of two entirely personal and corporeal gods, whose 
limbs are clothed in divine flesh, and whose brows are 
crowned with divine beauty ; yet so real that the quiver 
rattles at their shoulder, and the chariot bends beneath 
their weight. And, on the other hand, collaterally with 
these corporeal images, and never for one instant separated 
from them, he conceives also two omnipresent spiritual 
influences, of which one illuminates, as the sun, with a 
constant fire, whatever in humanity is skilful and wise ; 
and the other, like the living air, breathes the calm of 
Heavenly fortitude, and strength of righteous anger, into 
every human breast that is pure and brave. 

6. Now, therefore, in nearly every myth of importance, 
and certainly in every one of those of which I shall speak 
to-night, you have to discern these three structural parts — 
the root and the two branches : — the root, in physical ex- 
istence, sun, or sky, or cloud, or sea; then the personal in- 
carnation of that ; becoming a trusted and companionable 
deity, with whom you may walk hand in hand, as a child 
with its brother or its sister; and, lastly, the moral signi- 
ficance of the image, which is in all the great myths eter- 
nally and beneficently true. 

7. The great myths ; that is to say, myths made by great 
people. For the first plain fact about myth-making is one 
which has been most strangely lost sight of, — that you 
cannot make a myth unless you have something to make 
it of. You cannot tell a secret which you don't know. If 
the myth is about the sky, it must have been made by 
somebody who had looked at the sky. If the myth is about 



8 THE Ql i ia 01 l in: ah:. 

justice and fortitude, it must have been made by some one 
who knew what it was to be just or patient. According to 
the quantity of understanding in the person will be the 
quantity of significance in his fable ; and the myth of a 
simple and ignorant race must necessarily mean little, be- 
cause a simple and ignorant race have little to mean. So 
the great question in reading a story is always, not what 
wild hunter dreamed, or what childish race first dreaded 
it ; but what wise man first perfectly told, and what strong 
people first perfectly lived by it. And the real meaning 
of any myth is that which it has at the noblest age of the 
nation among whom it is current. The farther back you 
pierce, the less significance you will find, until you come 
to the first narrow thought, which, indeed, contains the 
germ of the accomplished tradition ; but only as the seed 
contains the flower. As the intelligence and passion of 
the race develop, they cling to and nourish their beloved 
and sacred legend ; leaf by leaf it expands under the touch 
of more pure affections, and more delicate imagination, 
until at last the perfect fable burgeons out into symmetry 
of milky stem, and honied bell. 

8. But through whatever changes it may pass, remember 
that our right reading of it is wholly dependent on the 
materials we have in our own minds for an intelligent 
answering sympathy. If it first arose among a people who 
dwelt under stainless skies, and measured their journeys 
by ascending and declining stars, we certainly cannot read 
their story, if we have never seen anything above us in 
the day, but smoke ; nor anything round us in the night but 



ATHENA IN THE HEAVENS. V 

candles. If the tale goes on to change clouds or planets 
into living creatures, — to invest them with fair forms — 
and inflame them with mighty passions, we can only un- 
derstand the story of the human-hearted things, in so far 
as we ourselves take pleasure in the perfectness of visible 
form, or can sympathize, by an effort of imagination, with 
the strange people who had other loves than that of wealth, 
and other interests than those of commerce. And, lastly, if 
the myth complete itself to the fulfilled thoughts of the 
nation, by attributing to the gods, whom they have carved 
out of their fantasy, continual presence with their own 
souls ; and their every effort for good is finally guided by 
the sense of the companionship, the praise, and the pure 
will of Immortals, we shall be able to follow them into 
this last circle of their faith only in the degree in which the 
better parts of our own beings have been also stirred by the 
aspects of nature, or strengthened by her laws. It may be 
easy to prove that the ascent of Apollo in his chariot sig- 
nifies nothing but the rising of the sun. But what does the 
sunrise itself signify to us ? If only languid return to friv- 
olous amusement, or fruitless labour, it will, indeed, not 
be easy for us to conceive the power, over a Greek, of the 
name of Apollo. But if, for us also, as for the Greek, the 
sunrise means daily restoration to the sense of passionate 
gladness and of perfect life — if it means the thrilling of 
new strength through every nerve, — the shedding over us 
of a better peace than the peace of night, in the power of 
the dawn, — and the purging of evil vision and fear by the 

baptism of its dew ; — if the sun itself is an influence, to us 
1* 



10 1111 Nil. AIU. 

also, of spiritual good — and becomes thus in reality,not in 
imagination, to us also, a spiritual power,— we may then 
Eoon over-pass the narrow limit of conception which kept 
that power impersonal, and rise with the Greek to the 
thought of an angel who rejoiced as a strong man to run 
his course, whose voice, calling to life and to labour, rang 
round the earth, and whose going forth was to the ends of 
heaven. 

9. The time, then, at which I shall take up for you, as 
well as I can decipher it, the tradition of the Gods of 
Greece, shall be near the beginning of its central and 
formed faith, — about 500 B.C., — a faith of which the char- 
acter is perfectly represented by Pindar and ^Eschylus, 
who are both of them outspokenly religious, and entirely 
sincere men ; while we may always look back to find the 
less developed thought of the preceding epoch given by 
Homer, in a more occult, subtle, half-instinctive and invol- 
untary way. 

10. Now, at that culminating period of the Greek re- 
ligion we find, under one governing Lord of all things, 
four subordinate elemental forces, and. four spiritual 
powers living in them, and commanding them. The 
elements are of course the well-known four of the an- 
cient world — the earth, the waters, the fire, and the 
air ; and the living powers of them are Demeter, the Latin 
Ceres ; Poseidon, the Latin Neptune ; Apollo, who has 
retained always his Greek name; and Athena, the Latin 
Minerva. Each of these are descended from, or changed 
from, more ancient, and therefore more mvstic deities of 



ATHENA IN THE HEAVENS. 11 

the earth and heaven, and of a finer element of aether 
supposed to be beyond the heavens ; * bnt at this time we 
find the four quite definite, both in their kingdoms and in 
their personalities. They are the rulers of the earth that 
we tread upon, and the air that we breathe ; and are with 
us as closely, in their vivid humanity, as the dust that 
they animate, and the winds that they bridle. I shall 
briefly define for you the range of their separate dominions, 
and then follow, as far as we have time, the most interest- 
ing of the legends which relate to the queen of the air. 

11. The rule of the first spirit, Demeter, the earth 
mother, is over the earth, first, as the origin of all life — 
the dust from whence we were taken : secondly, as the 
receiver of all things back at last into silence — " Dust 
thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." And, there- 
fore, as the most tender image of this appearing and 
fading life, in the birth and fall of flowers, her daughter 
Proserpine plays in the fields of Sicily, and thence is torn 
away into darkness, and becomes the Queen of Fate — not 
merely of death, but of the gloom which closes over and 
ends, not beauty only, but sin ; and chiefly of sins the sin 
against the life she gave: so that she is, in her highest 
power, Persephone, the avenger and purifier of blood, — ■ 
" The voice of thy brother's blood cries to me out of the 
ground.''' Then, side by side with this queen of the earth, 
we find a demigod of agriculture by the plough— the lord 
of grain, or of the thing ground by the mill. And it is a 
* And by modern science now also asserted, and with probability ar- 
gued, to exist. 



32 i in: QUEEN OF THE AIR. 

singular proof of the simplicity of Greek character at this 
noble time, that of all representations left to us of their 
deities by their art, few are so frequent, and none perhaps 
so beautiful, as the symbol ox this spirit of agriculture. 

12. Then the dominant spirit of the element of water 
is Neptune, but subordinate to him are myriads of other 
water spirits, of whom Kerens is the chief, with Palaemon, 
and Leucothea, the "white lady-' of the sea; and Thetis, 
and nymphs innumerable, who, like her, could "suffer a 
sea change," while the river deities had each independent 
power, according to the preciousness of their streams to the 
cities fed by them, — the "fountain Arethuse, and thou, 
honored flood, smooth sliding Mincius, crowned with vocal 
reeds." And, spiritually, this king of the waters is lord 
of the strength and daily flow of human life — he gives it 
material force and victory ; which is the meaning of the 
dedication of the hair, as the sign of the strength of life, 
to the river of the native land. 

13. Demeter, then, over the earth, and its giving and 
receiving of life. Neptune over the waters, and the flow 
and force of life, — always among the Greeks typified by 
the horse, which was to them as a crested sea-wave, ani- 
mated and bridled. Then the third element, fire, has set 
over it two powers : over earthly fire, the assistant of hu- 
man labour, is set Hephaestus, lord of all labour in which 
is the flush and the sweat of the brow ; and over heavenly 
fire, the source of day, is set Apollo, the spirit of all kin- 
dling, purifying, and illuminating intellectual wisdom; 



ATHENA IN THE HEAVENS. 13 

each of these gods having also their subordinate or associ- 
ated powers — servant, or sister, or companion muse. 
1 14 Then, lastly, we come to the myth which is to be 
our subject of closer inquiry — the story of Athena and of 
the deities subordinate to her. This great goddess, the 
Neith of the Egyptians, the Athena or Athenaia of the 
Greeks, and, with broken power, half usurped by Mars, 
the Minerva of the Latins, is, physically, the queen of the 
air ; having supreme power both over its blessing of calm, 
and wrath of storm ; and, spiritually, she is the queen of 
the breath of man, first of the bodily breathing which is 
lift to his blood, and strength to his arm in battle ; and 
then of the mental breathing, or inspiration, which is his 
moral health and habitual wisdom ; wisdom of conduct 
and of the heart, as opposed to the wisdom of imagina- 
tion and the brain ; moral, as distinct from intellectual ; 
inspired, as distinct from illuminated. 

15. By a singular, and fortunate, though I believe 
wholly accidental coincidence, the heart-virtue, of which 
she is the spirit, was separated by the ancients into four 
divisions, which have since obtained acceptance from all 
men as rightly discerned, and have received, as if from the 
quarters of the four winds of which Athena is the natural 
queen, the name of "Cardinal" virtues: namely, Pru- 
dence, (the right seeing, and foreseeing, of events through 
darkness) ; Justice, (the righteous bestowal of favour and 
of indignation) ; Fortitude, (patience under trial by pain) ; 
and Temperance, (patience under trial by pleasure). 
With respect to these four virtues, the attributes of 



li THE QUEEN OF THE All;. 

Athena are all distinct. In her prudence, or sight in 
darkness, she is " Glaukopis," "owl-eyed."* In herjus- 

\liich is the dominant virtue, she wears two robes, 
oneof lighl and one of darkness; the robe of light, saffron 
colour, or the colour of the daybreak, falls to her feet, 
covering her wholly with favour and love. — the calm of 
the sky in blessing ; it is embroidered along its edge with 
her victory over the giants, (the troublous powers of the 
earth,) and the likeness of it was woven yearly by the 
Athenian maidens and carried to the temple of their own 
Athena, — not to the Parthenon, that was the temple of 
all the world's Athena, — but this they carried to the 
temple of their own only one, who loved them, and stayed 
with them always. Then her robe of indignation is worn 
on her breast and left arm only, fringed with fatal ser- 
pents, and fastened with Gorgonian cold, turning men to 
stone ; physically, the lightning and the hail of chastise- 
ment by storm. Then in her fortitude she wears the 
crested and unstooping helmet ; f and lastly, in her tem- 
perance, she is the queen of maidenhood — stainless as the 
air of heaven. 

16. But all these virtues mass themselves in the Greek 
mind into the two main ones — of Justice, or noble pas- 
sion, and Fortitude, or noble patience ; and of these, the 

* There are many other meanings in (he epithet; see, farther on, § 91, p. 
105. 

f I am compelled, for clearness' sake, to mark only one neaning at 
a time. Athena's helmet is sometimes a mask— sometimes a sign of 
anger — sometimes of the highest light of aether ; but I cannot speak of 
all this at once. 



ATHENA IN THE HEAVENS. l!) 

chief powers of Athena, the Greeks had divinely written 
for them, and for all men after them, two mighty songs, — ■ 
one, of the Menis,* mens, passion, or zeal, of Athena, 
breathed into a mortal whose name is "Ache of heart," 
and whose short life is only the incarnate brooding and 
burst of storm ; and the other is of the foresight and. 
fortitude of Athena, maintained by her in the heart of a 
mortal whose name is given to him from a longer grief, 
Odysseus, the full of sorrow, the much-enduring, and the 
long-suffering. 

17. The minor expressions by the Greeks in word, in 
symbol, and in religious service, of this faith, are so many 
and so beautiful, that I hope some day to gather at least' a 
few of them into a separate body of evidence respecting 
the power of Athena, and its relations to the ethical 
conception of the Homeric poems, or, rather, to their 
ethical nature; for they are not conceived didactically, 
but are didactic in their essence, as all good art is. There 
is an increasing insensibility to this character, and even 
an open denial of it, among us, now, which is one of the 
most curious errors of modernism, — the peculiar and 
judicial blindness of an age which, having long practised 
art and poetry for the sake of pleasure only, has become 
incapable of reading their language when they were both 
didactic: and also, having been itself accustomed to a 
professedly didactic teaching, which yet, for private 

* This first word of the Iliad, Menis, afterwards passes into the Latin 
Mens; is the root of the Latin name for Athena, "Minerva," and so 
of the English "mind." 



1G i in qi i i:x of the Ant. 

interests, studiously avoids collision with every prevalent 
vice of it> day, (and especially with avarice), lias become 
equally dead to the intensely ethical conceptions of a rare 
which habitually divided all men into two broad classes 
of worthy or worthless; — good, and good for nothing. 
And even the celebrated passage of Horace about the 
Iliad is now misread or disbelieved, as if it was impossible 
that the Iliad could be instructive because it is not like a 
sermon. Horace does not say that it is like a sermon, and 
would have been still less likely to say so, if he ever had 
had the advantage of hearing a sermon. " I have been 
reading that story of Troy again " (thus he writes to 
a noble youth of Rome whom he cared for), " quietly at 
Prseneste, while you have been busy at Rome; and truly 
I think that what is base and what is noble, and what 
useful and useless, may be better learned from that, than 
from all Chrysippus' and Crantor's talk put together." * 
Which is profoundly true, not of the Iliad only, but of all 
other great art whatsoever ; for all pieces of such art are 
didactic in the purest way, indirectly and occultly, so that, 
first, you shall only be bettered by them if you are already 
hard at work in bettering yourself; and when you are bet- 
tered by them, it shall be partly with a general acceptance 
of their influence, so constant and subtle that you shall be 
no more conscious of it than of the healthy digestion of 
food ; and partly by a gift of unexpected truth, which you 

* Note, once for all, that unless when there is question about some 
particular expression, I never translate literally, but give the real force 
of what is said, as I best can, freely. 



ATHENA IN THE HEAVENS. 17 

shall only find by slow mining for it ; — which is withheld 
on purpose, and close-locked, that you may not get it till 
you have forged the key of it in a. furnace of your own 
heating. And this withholding of their meaning is con- 
tinual, and confessed, in the great poets. Thus Pindar 
says of himself: " There is many an arrow in my quiver, 
full of speech to the wise, but, for the many, they need in- 
terpreters." And neither Pindar, nor iEschylus, nor 
Hesiod, nor Homer, nor any of the greater poets or 
teachers of any nation or time, ever spoke but with inten- 
tional reservation : nay, beyond this, there is often a 
meaning which they themselves cannot interpret, — which 
it may be for ages long after them to interpret, — in what 
they said, so far as it recorded true imaginative vision. 
For all the greatest myths have been seen, by the men 
who tell them, involuntarily and passively, — seen by them 
with as great distinctness (and in some respects, though 
not in all, under conditions as far beyond the control of 
their will) as a dream sent to any of us by night when we 
dream clearest ; and it is this veracity of vision that could 
not be refused, and of moral that could not be foreseen, 
which in modern historical inquiry has been left wholly 
out of account : being indeed the thing which no merely 
historical investigator can understand, or even believe; 
for it belongs exclusively to the creative or artistic group 
of men, and can only be interpreted by those of their race, 
who themselves in some measure also see visions and dream 
dreams. 

So that you may obtain a more truthful idea of the 



13 THE Ql I I N OF THE AIR. 

nature of Greek religion and legend from the poems 
of Keats, and the nearly as beautiful, and, in general 
grasp of subject, far more powerful, recent work of Morris, 
than from frigid scholarship, however extensive. Not 
that the poet's impressions or renderings of things are 
wholly true, but their truth is vital, not formal. They are 
like sketches from the life by Reynolds or Gainsborough, 
which may be demonstrably inaccurate or imaginary in 
many traits, and indistinct in others, yet will be in the 
deepest sense like, and true ; while the work of historical 
analysis is too often weak with loss, through the very 
labour of its miniature touches, or useless in clumsy and 
vapid veracity of externals, and complacent security of 
having done all that is required for the portrait, when it 
has measured the breadth of the forehead, and the length 
of the nose. 

18. The first of requirements, then, for the right read- 
ing of myths, is the understanding of the nature of all 
true vision by noble persons ; namely, that it is founded 
on constant laws common to all human nature; that it 
perceives, however darkly, things which are for all ages 
true ; — that we can only understand it so far as we have 
some perception of the same truth ; — and that its fulness 
is developed and manifested more and more by the rever- 
beration of it from minds of the same mirror-temper, in 
succeeding ages. You will understand Homer better by 
seeing his reflection in Dante, as you may trace new forms 
and softer colours in a hill-side, redoubled by a lake. 

I shall be able partly to show you, even to-night, how 



ATHENA EST THE HEAVENS. 19 

much, in the Homeric vision of Athena, has been made 
clearer by the advance of time, being thus essentially and 
eternally true ; but I must in the outset indicate the rela- 
tion to that central thought of the imagery of the inferior 
deities of storm. 

19. And first I will take the myth of ^Eolus, (the " sage 
Hippotades " of Milton,) as it is delivered pure by Homer 
from the early times. 

Why do you suppose Milton calls him " sage ? " One 
does not usually think of the winds as very thoughtful or 
deliberate powers. But hear Homer : " Then we came 
to the JEolian island, and there dwelt JEolus Hippotades, 
dear to the deathless gods : there he dwelt in a floating 
island, and round it was a wall of brass that could not be 
broken ; and the smooth rock of it ran up sheer. To whom 
twelve children were born in the sacred chambers — six 
daughters and six strong sons; and they dwell for ever 
with their beloved father, and their mother strict in duty ; 
and with them are laid up a thousand benefits ; and the 
misty house around them rings with fluting all the day 
long." ISTow, you are to note first, in this description, the 
wall of brass and the sheer rock. You will find, through- 
out the fables of the tempest-group, that the brazen wall 
and precipice (occurring in another myth as the brazen 
tower of Danae) are always connected with the idea of the 
towering cloud lighted by the sun, here truly described as 
a floating island. Secondly, you hear that all treasures 
were laid up in them ; therefore, you know this ^Eolus is 
lord of the beneficent winds (" he bringeth the wind out 



20 THE QUEEN OF THE AIR. 

of his treasuries"); and presently afterwards Homer calls 
him ilif " steward " of the winds, the master of the store- 
house of them. And this idea of gifts and preciousness in 

the winds of heaven is carried out in the well-known 
sequel of the fable : — iEolus gives them to Ulysses, all bnt 
one, bound in leathern bags, with a glittering cord of 
silver ; and so like bags of treasure that the sailors think 
they are so, and open tliem to see. And when Ulysses is 
thus driven back to JEolus, and prays him again to help 
him, note the deliberate words of the King's refusal, — 
" Did I not," he says, " send thee on thy way heartily, that 
thou mightest reach thy country, thy home, and whatever 
is dear to thee ? It is not lawful for me again to send forth 
favourably on his journey a man hated by the happy gods." 
This idea of the beneficence of JEolus remains to the latest 
times, though Virgil, by adopting the vulgar change of the 
cloud island into Lipari, has lost it a little ; but even when 
it is finally explained away by Diodorus, ^Eolus is still a 
kind-hearted monarch, who lived on the coast of Sorrento, 
invented the use of sails, and established a system of storm 
signals. 

20. Another beneficent storm-power, Boreas, occupies 
an important place in early legend, and a singularly prin- 
cipal one in art ; and I wish I could read to you a passage 
of Plato about the legend of Boreas and Oreithyia,* and 
the breeze and shade of the Ilissus — notwithstanding its 

* Translated by Max Miiller in the opening of his essay on ' ' Com • 
para tivc Mythology." (Chips from a German ~\York$liop, xo\. ii.) 



ATHENA IN THE HEAVENS. ' 21 

severe reflection upon persons who waste their time on 
mythological studies: but I must go on at once to the 
fable with which you are all generally familiar^ that of 
the Harpies. 

This is always connected with that of Boreas or the 
north wind, because the two sons of Boreas are enemies of 
the Harpies, and drive them away into frantic flight. The 
myth in its first literal form means only the battle between 
the fair north wind and the foul south one: the two 
Harpies, " Stormswift " and " Swiftfoot," are the sisters 
of the rainbow — that is to say, they are the broken drifts 
of the showery south wind, and the clear north wind drives 
them back ; but they quickly take a deeper and more 
malignant significance. You know the short, violent, 
spiral gusts that lift the dust before coming rain : the 
Harpies get identified first with these, and then w T ith more 
violent whirlwinds, and so they are called " Harpies," 
" the Snatchers," and are thought of as entirely destruc- 
tive ; their manner of destroying being twofold — by snatch- 
ing away, and by defiling and polluting. This is a month 
in which you may really see a small Harpy at her work 
almost whenever you choose. The first time that there is 
threatening of rain after two or three days of fine weather, 
leave your window well open to the street, and some books 
or papers on the table ; and if you do not, in a little while, 
know what the Harpies mean ; and how they snatch, and 
how they defile, I'll give up my Greek myths. 

21. That is the physical meaning. It is now easy 
to find the mental one. You must all have felt the 



22 THE QUEEN OF THE Air.. 

expression of ignoble anger in those fitful gusts of sudden 
Btorm. There is a sense of provocation and apparent 
bitterness of purpose in their thin and senseless fury, 
wholly different from the noble anger of the greater tem- 
pests. Also, they seem useless and unnatural, and the 
Greek thinks of them always as vile in malice, and opposed, 
therefore, to the sons of Boreas, "who are kindly winds, 
that fill sails, and wave harvests, — full of bracing health 
and happy impulses. From this lower and merely mali- 
cious temper, the Harpies rise into a greater terror, always 
associated with their whirling motion, which is indeed 
indicative of the most destructive winds: and they are 
thus related to the nobler tempests, as Charybdis to the 
sea ; they are devouring and desolating, merciless, making 
all things disappear that come in their grasp : and so, 
spiritually, they are the gusts of vexatious, fretful, lawless 
passion, vain and overshadowing, discontented and lament- 
ing, meagre and insane, — spirits of wasted energy, and 
wandering disease, and unappeased famine, and unsatis- 
fied hope. So you have, on the one side, the winds of 
prosperity and health, on the other, of ruin and sickness. 
Understand that, once, deeply — any who have ever known 
the weariness of vain desires ; the pitiful, unconquerable, 
coiling and recoiling and self-involved returns of some 
sickening famine and thirst of heart : — and you will know 
what was in the sound of the Harpy Celaeno's shriek from 
her rock ; and why, in the seventh circle of the "Inferno," 
the Harpies make their nests in the warped branches of 
the trees that are the souls of suicides. 



ATHENA IN THE HEAVENS. 23 

22. Now you must always be prepared to read Greek 
legends as you trace threads through figures on a silken 
damask : the same thread runs through the web, but it 
makes part of different figures. Joined with other colours 
you hardly recognize it, and in different lights, it is dark 
or light. Thus the Greek fables blend and cross curiously 
in different directions, till they knit themselves into an 
arabesque where sometimes you cannot tell black from 
purple, nor blue from emerald — they being all the truer 
for this, because the truths of emotion they represent are 
interwoven in the same way, but all the more difficult to 
read, and to explain in any order. Thus the Harpies, as 
they represent vain desire, are connected with the Sirens, 
who are the spirits of constant desire : so that it is difficult 
sometimes in early art to know which are meant, both 
being represented alike as birds with women's heads ; only 
the Sirens are the great constant desires — the infinite sick- 
nesses of heart — which, rightly placed, give life, and 
wrongly placed, waste it away ; so that there are two 
groups of Sirens, one noble and saving, as the other is 
fatal. But there are no animating or saving Harpies ; 
their nature is always vexing and full of weariness, and 
thus they are curiously connected with the whole group of 
legends about Tantalus. 

23. We all know what it is to be tantalized ; but we do 
not often think of asking what Tantalus was tantalized 
for — what he had done, to be for ever kept hungry in sight 
of food ? Well ; he had not been condemned to this mere- 
ly for being a glutton. By Dante the same punishment is 



24 l li i: QUEEN OF THE AIR. 

assigned to simple gluttony, to purge it away;— bat the 
sins of Tantalus were of a much wider and inure mysterious 

kind. There are four great sins attributed to him — one, 
stealing the food of the Gods to give it to men ; another, 
sacrificing his son to feed the Gods themselves, (it may 
remind you for a moment of what I was telling you of the 
earthly character of Demeter, that, while the other Gods 
all refuse, she, dreaming about her lost daughter, eats part 
of the shoulder of Pelops before she knows what she is 
doing) ; another sin is, telling the secrets of the Gods ; 
and only the fourth — stealing the golden dog of Pandareos 
— is connected with gluttony. The special sense of this 
myth is marked by Pandareos receiving the happy privi- 
lege of never being troubled with indigestion ; the dog, in 
general, however, mythically represents all utterly sense- 
less and carnal desires; mainly that of gluttony; and in 
the mythic sense of Hades — that is to say, so far as it 
represents spiritual ruin in this life, and not a literal hell — - 
the dog Cerberus is its gate-keeper — with this special 
marking of his character of sensual passion, that he fawns 
on all those who descend, but rages against all who would 
return, (the Virgilian " facilis descensus " being a later 
recognition of this mythic character of Hades :) the last 
labour of Hercules is the dragging him up to the light ; 
and in some sort, he represents the voracity or devouring 
of Hades itself; and the mediaeval representation of the 
mouth of hell perpetuates the same thought. Then, also, 
the power of evil passion is partly associated with the red 
and scorching light of Sirius, as opposed to the pure light 



ATHENA IN THE HEAVENS. 25 

of the sun : — he is the dog-star of ruin ; and hence the 
continual Homeric dwelling upon him, and comparison of 
the flame of anger to his swarthy light ; only, in his 
scorching, it is thirst, not hunger, over which he rules 
physically ; so that the fable of Icarius, his first master, 
corresponds, among the Greeks, to the legend of the drunk- 
enness of IsToah. 

The story of Actseon, the raging death of Hecuba, and 
the tradition of the white dog which ate part of Hercules' 
first sacrifice, and so gave name to the Cynosarges, are all 
various phases of the same thought — the Greek notion of 
the dog being throughout confused between its serviceable 
fidelity, its watchfulness, its foul voracity, shame! essness, 
and deadly madness, while, w T ith the curious reversal or 
recoil of the meaning which attaches itself to nearly every 
great myth — and which we shall presently see notably 
exemplified in the relations of the serpent to Athena, — the 
dog becomes in philosoplry a type of severity and absti- 
nence. 

24. It would carry us too far aside were I to tell you 
the story of Pan'dareos' dog— or rather, of Jupiter's dog, 
for Pandareos was its guardian only; all that bears on our 
present purpose is' that the guardian of this golden dog had 
three daughters, one of whom was subject to the power of 
the Sirens, and is turned into the nightingale; and the 
other two were subject to the power of the Harpies, and 
this was what happened to them. r -Chey were very beau- 
tiful, and they were beloved by the gods in their youth, 
and all the great goddesses were anxious to bring them up 



iib Tin: QUEEN 01 i in: air. 

rightly. Of all types of young ladies' education, there is 
nothing so splendid as that of the younger daughters of 
Pandareos. They have literally the four greatesi god- 

- for their governesses. Athena teaches them domes- 
lie accomplishments; how to weave, and sew, and the 
like; Artemis teaches them to hold themselves up straight ; 
Hera, how to behave proudly and oppressively to com- 
pany; and Aphrodite — delightful governess — feeds them 
with cakes and honey all day long. All goes well, until 
just the time when they are going to be brought out; 
then there is a great dispute whom they are to marry, and 
in the midst of it they are carried off by the Harpies, 
given by them to be slaves to the Furies, and never seen 
more. But of course there is nothing in Greek myths; 
and one never heard of such things as vain desires, and 
empty hopes, and clouded passions, defiling and snatching 
away the souls of maidens, in a London season. 

I have no time to trace for you any more harpy legends, 
though they are full of the most curious interest ; but I 
may confirm for you my interpretation of this one, and 
prove its importance in the Greek mind, by noting that 
Polygnotus painted these maidens, in his great religious 
series of paintings at Delphi, crowned with flowers, and 
playing at dice; and that Penelope remembers them in 
her last fit of despair, just before the return of Ulysses; 
and prays bitterly that she may be snatched away at once 
into nothingness by the Harpies, like Pandareos' daugh- 
ters, rather than be tormented longer by her deferred 
hope, and anguish of disappointed love. 



ATHENA EST THE HEAVENS. 27 

25. I have hitherto spoken only of deities of the winds. 
We pass now to a far more important group, the Deities 
of Cloud. Both of these are subordinate to the ruling 
power of the air, as the demigods of the fountains and 
minor seas are to the great deep : but, as the cloud-firma- 
ment detaches itself more from the air, and has a wider 
range of ministry than the minor streams and seas, the 
highest cloud deity, Hermes, has a rank more equal with 
Athena than Kerens or Proteus with Neptune; and there 
is greater difficulty in tracing his character, because his 
physical dominion over the clouds can, of course, be assert- 
ed only where clouds are ; and, therefore, scarcely at all in 
Egypt:* so that the changes which Hermes undergoes in 
becoming a Greek from an Egyptian and Phoenician god, 
are greater than in any other case of adopted tradition. 
In Egypt Hermes is a deity of historical record, and a con- 
ductor of the dead to judgment ; the Greeks take away 
much of this historical function, assigning it to the Muses; 
but, in investing him with the physical power over clouds, 
they give him that which the Muses disdain, the power of 
concealment, and of theft. The snatching away by the 

* I believe that the conclusions of recent scholarship are generally 
opposed to the Herodotean ideas of any direct acceptance by the Greeks 
of Egyptian myths : and very certainly, Greek art is developed by giving 
the veracity and simplicity of real life to Eastern savage grotesque ; and 
not by softening the severity of pure Egyptian design. But it is of no 
consequence whether one conception was, or was not, in this case, 
derived from the other ; my object is only to mark the essential differ- 
ences between them. 



2S THE Ql II \ OF THE All;. 

Elarpies is with brute force; but the snatching awaj by 
the clouds is connected with the thought of hiding, and <>t" 
making things seem to he what they are not; so that 
Hermes is the god of lying, as he is of mist; and yet with 

this ignoble function of making things vanish and disap- 
pear, is connected the remnant of his grand Egyptian 
authority of leading away souls in the cloud of death (the 
actual dimness of sight caused by mortal wounds physi- 
cally suggesting the darkness and descent of clouds, and 
continually being so described in the Iliad); while the 
sense of the need of guidance on the untrodden road fol- 
lows necessarily. You cannot but remember how this 
thought of cloud guidance, and cloud receiving of souls at 
$eath, has been elsewhere ratified. 

26. "Without following that higher clue, I will pass to 
the lovely group of myths connected with the birth of 
Hermes on the Greek mountains. You know that the 
valley of Sparta is one of the noblest mountain ravines in 
the world, and that the western flank of it is formed by an 
unbroken chain of crags, forty miles long, rising, opposite 
Sparta, to a height of 8,000 feet, and known as the chain 
of Taygetus. Now, the nymph from whom that moun- 
tain ridge is named, was the mother of Lacedsemon ; there- 
fore, the mythic ancestress of the Spartan race. She is 
the nymph Taygeta, and one of the seven stars of spring ; 
one of those Pleiades of whom is the question to Job, — 
"Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose 
the bands of Orion ? " " The sweet influences of Pleiades," 
of the stars of spring, — nowhere sweeter than among the 



ATHENA IN THE HEAVENS. 29 

pine-clad slopes of the hills of Sparta and Arcadia, when 
the snows of their higher summits, beneath the sunshine 
of April, fell into fountains, and rose into clouds ; and in 
every ravine was a newly-awakened voice of waters, — ■ 
soft increase of whisper among its sacred stones : and on 
every crag its forming and fading veil of radiant cloud ; 
temple above temple, of the divine marble that no tool can 
pollute, nor ruin undermine. And, therefore, beyond this 
central valley, this great Greek vase of Arcadia, on the " hol- 
low'''' mountain, Cyllene, or "pregnant" mountain, called 
also " cold," because there the vapours rest,* and born of 
the eldest of those stars of spring, that Maia, from whom 
your own month of May has its name, bringing to you, in 
the green of her garlands, and the white of her hawthorn, 
the unrecognized symbols of the pastures and the wreathed 
snows of Arcadia, where long ago she was queen of stars : 
there, first cradled and wrapt in swaddling-clothes ; then 
raised, in a moment of surprise, into his wandering power, — ■ 
is born the shepherd of the clouds, winged-footed and 
deceiving, — blinding the eyes of Argus, — escaping from 
the grasp of Apollo — restless messenger between the high- 
est sky and topmost earth — " the herald Mercury, new 
lighted on a heaven-kissing hill." 

27. Now, it will be wholly impossible, at present, to 
trace for you any of the minor Greek expressions of this 
thought, except only that Mercury, as the cloud shepherd, 

* On the altar of Herrnes on its summit, as on that of the Lacinian 
Hera, no wind ever stirred the ashes. By those altars, the Gods of 
Heaven were appeased ; and all their storms at rest. 



30 i ill" Ql i.i n 01 i in: air. 

is especially called Eriophoros, the wool beai'er. You will 
recollect the name from tlie common woolly rush "erio- 
phorum " which lias a cloud of silky seed; and note also 
that lie wears distinctively the flat cap, petasos, named 
from a word meaning to expand ; which shaded from the 
sun, and is worn on journeys. You have the epithel of 
mountains "cloud-capped" as an established form with 
every poet, and the Mont Pilate of Lucerne is named from 
a Latin word signifying specially a woollen cap ; but Mer- 
cury has, besides, a general Homeric epithet, curiously and 
intensely concentrated in meaning, " the profitable or ser- 
viceable by wool," * that is to say, by shepherd wealth ; 
hence, " pecuniarily," rich, or serviceable, and so he passes 
at last into a general mercantile deity ; while yet the cloud 
sense of the wool is retained by Homer always, so that he 
gives him this epithet when it would otherwise have been 
quite meaningless, (in Iliad,, xxiv. MO,) wiien he drives 
Priam's chariot, and breathes force into his horses, pre- 
cisely as we shall find Athena drive Diomed : and yet the 
serviceable and profitable sense, — and something also of 
gentle and soothing character in the mere wool-softness, 
as used for dress, and religious rites, — is retained also in 
the epithet, and thus the gentle and serviceable Hermes is 
opposed to the deceitful one. 

* I am convinced that the ipi in Ipiovvnt is not intensitive ; but 
retained from cptov : but even if I am wrong in thinking this, the mis- 
take is of no consequence with respect to the general force of the term 
as meaning the profitableness of Hermes. Athena's epithet of dyeXsfa 
has a parallel significance. 



ATHENA IN THE HEAVENS. 31 

28. In connection with this driving of Priam's chariot, 
remember that as Autolycus is the son of Hermes the 
Deceiver, Myrtilus (the Auriga of the Stars) is the son of 
Hermes the Guide. The name Hermes itself means 
Impulse ; and he is especially the shepherd of the flocks 
of the sky, in driving, or guiding, or stealing them ; and 
yet his great name, Argeiphontes, not only — as in differ- 
ent passages of the olden poets — means " Shining "White," 
which is said of him as being himself the silver cloud 
lighted by the sun; but "Argus-Killer," the killer of 
brightness, which is said of him as he veils the sky, and 
especially the stars, which are the eyes of Argus ; or, lite- 
rally, eyes of brightness, which Juno, who is, with Jupiter, 
part of the type of highest heaven, keeps in her peacock's 
train. We know that this interpretation is right, from a 
passage in which Euripides describes the shield of Hippo- 
medon, which bore for its sign, " Argus the all -seeing, cov- 
ered with eyes ; open towards the rising of the stars, and 
closed towards their setting." 

And thus Hermes becomes the spirit of the movement 
of the sky or firmament ; not merely the fast flying of the 
transitory cloud, but the great motion of the heavens and 
stars themselves: Thus, in his highest power, he corre- 
sponds to the " primo mobile" of the later Italian philos- 
ophy, and, in his simplest, is the guide of all mysterious 
and cloudy movement, and of all successful subtleties. 
Perhaps the prettiest minor recognition of his character 
is when, on the night foray of Ulysses and Diomed, TJlys- 



32 TUB QUE! \ OF i in: \n:. 

ses wears the helmet stolen by Autolycns, the sun of 
Hermes. 

29. The position in the Greek mind of Hermes as the 

Lord of cloud is, however, more mystic and ideal than 
that of any other deity, just on account of the constant 
and real presence of the cloud itself under different forms, 
giving rise to all kinds of minor fables. The play of the 
Greek imagination in this direction is so wide and com- 
plex, that I cannot even give you an outline of its range 
in n ly present limits. There is first a great series of storm- 
legends connected with the familv of the historic JEolus, 
centralized by the story of Athamas, with his two wives, 
"the Cloud" and the "White Goddess," ending in that of 
Phrixus and Helle, and of the golden fleece (which is only 
the cloud-burden of Hermes Eriophoros). With this, 
there is the fate of Salmoneus, and the destruction 
of Glaucus by his own horses ; all these minor myths of 
storm concentrating themselves darkly into the legend of 
Bellerophon and the Chimasra, in which there is an under 
story about the vain subduing of passion and treachery, 
and the end of life in fading melancholy, — which, I hope, 
not many of you could understand even were I to show it 
you : (the merely physical meaning of the Chimasra is the 
cloud of volcanic lightning, connected wholly with earth- 
fire, but resembling the heavenly cloud in its height and 
its thunder). Finally, in the JEolie group, there is the 
legend of Sisyphus, which I mean to work out thoroughly 
by itself: its root is in the position of Corinth as ruling 



ATHENA IN THE HEAVENS. 33 

the isthmus and the two seas — the Corinthian Acropolis, 
two thousand feet high, being the centre of the crossing 
currents of the winds, and -of the commerce of Greece. 
Therefore, Athena, and the fountain cloud Pegasus, are 
more closely connected with Corinth than even with 
Athens in their material, though not in their moral power ; 
and Sisyphus founds the Isthmian games in connection 
with a melancholy story about the sea gods ; but he him- 
self is xepSia-TOi eivSpai, the most "gaining" and subtle of 
men ; who, having the key of the Isthmus, becomes the 
type of transit, transfer, or trade, as such ; and of the ap- 
parent gain from it, which is not gain : and this is the real 
meaning of his punishment in hell — eternal toil and re- 
coil (the modern idol of capital being, indeed, the stone of 
Sisyphus with a vengeance, crushing in its recoil). But, 
throughout, the old ideas of the cloud power and cloud 
feebleness, — the deceit of its hiding, — and the emptiness 
of its vanishing, — the Autolycus enchantment of making 
black seem white, — and the disappointed fury of Ixion 
(taking shadow for power), mingle in the moral meaning 
of this and its collateral legends ; and give an aspect, at 
last, not only of foolish cunning, but of impiety or literal 
"idolatry," "imagination worship," to the -dreams of ava- 
rice and injustice, until this notion of atheism and inso- 
lent blindness becomes principal; and the "Clouds" of 
Aristophanes, with the personified "just" and "unjust" 
sayings in the latter part of the play, foreshadow, almost 
feature by feature, in all that they were written to mock 
2* 



3-i 1 Hi: QUEEN OF THE AJB. 

and to chastise, the wore! elements of the impious "Jims' 1 
and tumult in men's thoughts, which have followed on 
their avarice in the presenl day, making them alike forsake 
the laws of their ancient gods, and misapprehend or reject 
the true words of their existing- teachers. 

30. All this we have from the legends of the historic 
JEolus only; but, besides these, there is the beautiful story 
of Semele, the Mother of Bacchus. She is the cloud with 
the strength of the vine in its bosom, consumed by the 
light which matures the fruit; the melting away of the 
- cloud into the clear air at the fringe of its edges being ex- 
quisitely rendered by Pindar's epithet for her, Semele, 
" with the stretched-out hair" (rawtfatpx). Then there is 
the entire tradition of the Danaides, and of the tower of 
Danae and golden shower ; the birth of Perseus connect- 
ing this legend with that of the Gorgons and Grain?, who 
are the true clouds of thunderous and ruinous tempest. 
I must, in passing, mark for you that the form of the sword 
or sickle of Perseus, with which he kills Medusa, is anoth- 
er image of the whirling harpy vortex, and belongs espe- 
cially to the sword of destruction or annihilation ; whence 
it is given to the two angels who gather for destruction 
the evil harvest and evil vintage of the earth (Rev. xiv. 15). 
I will collect afterwards and complete what I have already 
written respecting the Pegasean and Gorgonian legends, 
noting here only what is necessary to explain the central 
myth of Athena herself, who represents the ambient air, 
which included all cloud, and rain, and dew, and dark- 



ATHENA IN THE HEAVENS. 35 

ness, and peace, and wrath of heaven. Let me now try to 
give you, however briefly, some distinct idea of the several 
agencies of this great goddess. 

31. I. She is the air giving life and health to all 

animals. 
II. She is the air giving vegetative power to the 
earth. 
III. She is the air giving motion to the sea, and ren- 
dering navigation possible. 
TV. She is the air nourishing artificial light, torch or 
lamplight ; as opposed to that of the sun, on 
one hand, and of consuming " x " fire on the other. 
Y. She is the air conveying vibration of sound. 
I will give you instances of her agency in all these 
functions. 

32. First, and chiefly, she is air as the spirit of life, 
giving vitality to the blood. Her psychic relation to the 
vital force in matter lies deeper, and we will examine it 
afterwards ; but a great number of the most interesting 
passages in Homer regard her as flying over the earth in 
local and transitory strength, simply and merely the god- 
dess of fresh air. 

It is curious that the British city which has somewhat 
saucily styled itself the Modern Athens, is indeed more 
under her especial tutelage and favour in this respect than 
perhaps any other town in the island. Athena is first 
simply what in the Modern Athens you so practically 

* Not a scientific, but a very practical and expressive distinction. 



•',0 THE QT i in 01 THE am:. 

find her, the breeze of the mountain and the sea; and 
wherever she comes, there is purification, and health, and 
power. The sea-beach round this isle of ours is the frieze 
of our Parthenon ; every wave that breaks on it thunders 
with Athena's voice ; nay, whenever you throw your win- 
dow wide open in the morning, you let in Athena, as wis- 
dom and fresh air at the same instant ; and whenever you 
draw a pure, long, full breath of right heaven, you take 
Athena into your heart, through your blood; and, with 
the blood, into the thoughts of your brain. 

Now this giving of strength by the air, observe, is 
mechanical as well as chemical. You cannot strike a 
good blow but with your chest full ; and in hand to hand 
lighting, it is not the muscle that fails first, it is the breath; 
the longest-breathed will, on the average, be the victor — 
not the strongest. Note how Shakspeare always leans on 
this. Of Mortimer, in " changing hardiment with great 
Glendower : " — 

" Three times they breathed, and three times did they drink, 
Upon agreement, of swift Severn's flood." 
And again, Hotspur sending challenge to Prince Harry :— 
" That none might draw short breath to-day 
But I and Harry Monmouth." 
Again, of Hamlet, before he receives his wound :— 

"He's fat, and scant of breath." 
Again, Orlando in the wrestling : — 

" Yes; I beseech your grace 
I am not yet well breathed." 
Now of all people that ever lived, the Greeks knew best 



ATHENA IN THE HEAVENS. 37 

what breath meant, both in exercise arid in battle ; and 
therefore the queen of the air becomes to them at once the 
queen of bodily strength in war ; not mere brutal mus- 
cular strength, — that belongs to Ares,— but the strength 
of young lives passed in pure air and swift exercise, — 
Camilla's virginal force, that " flies o'er the unbending 
corn, and skims along the main." 

33. jSTow I will rapidly give you two or three instances 
of her direct agency in this function. First, when she 
wants to make Penelope bright and beautiful ; and to do 
away with the signs of her waiting and her grief. " Then 
Athena thought of another thing; she laid her into deep 
sleep, and loosed all her limbs, and made her taller, and 
made her smoother, and fatter, and whiter than sawn 
ivory; and breathed ambrosial brightness over her face; 
and so she left her and went up to heaven." Fresh air 
and sound sleep at night, young ladies ! You see you 
may have Athena for lady's maid whenever you choose. 
Next, hark how she gives strength to Achilles when he 
is broken with fasting and grief. Jupiter pities him and 
says to her,—" ' Daughter mine, are you forsaking your 
own soldier, and don't you care for Achilles any more ? 
see how hungry and weak he is, — go and feed him with 
ambrosia.' So he urged the eager Athena; and she leaped 
down out of heaven like a harpy falcon, shrill voiced; and 
she poured nectar and ambrosia, full of delight, into the 
breast of Achilles, that his limbs might not fail with fam- 
ine : then she returned to the solid dome of her strong fa- 
ther." And then comes the great passage about Achilles 



38 * THE QUE] \ OE THE All:. 

arming for which we have no time. Bui here is again 
Athena giving strength to the whole Greek army. She 
came as a falcon to Achilles, straight at him; — a sudden 
drift of breeze; but to the army she must come widely, - 
she sweeps round them all. "As when Jupiter spreads 
the purple rainbow over heaven, portending battle or 
cold storm, so Athena, wrapping herself round with a 
purple cloud, stooped to the Greek soldiers, and raised up 
each of them." Note that purple, in Homer's use of it, 
nearly always means "fiery," "full of light," It is the 
light of the rainbow, not the colour of it, which Homer 
means you to think of. 

34. But the most curious passage of all, and fullest of 
meaning, is when she gives strength to Menelaus, that he 
may stand unwearied against Hector. He prays to her : 
"And blue-eyed Athena was glad that he prayed to 
her, first ; and she gave him strength in his shoulders, and 
in his limbs, and she gave him the courage" — of what 
animal, do you suppose ? Had it been Neptune or Mars, 
they would have given him the courage of a bull, or a 
lion; but Athena gives him the courage of the most fear- 
less in attack of all creatures — small or great — and very 
small it is, but wholly incapable of terror, — she gives 
him the courage of a fly. 

35. Now this simile of Homer's is one of the best in- 
stances I can give you of the way in which great writers 
seize truths unconsciously which are for all time. It is 
only recent science which has completely shown the per- 
fectness of this minute symbol of the power of Athena; 



ATHENA EN" THE HEAVENS. 30 

proving that the insect's flight and breath are co-ordina- 
ted ; that its wings are actually forcing-pumps, of which 
the stroke compels the thoracic respiration; and that 
it thus breathes and flies simultaneously by the action of 
the same muscles, so that respiration is carried on most 
vigorously- during flight, " while the air-vessels, supplied 
by many pairs of lungs instead of one, traverse the organs 
of flight in far greater numbers than the capillary blood- 
vessels of our own system, and give enormous and untir- 
ing muscular power, a rapidity of action measured by 
thousands of strokes in the minute, and an endurance, by 
miles and hours of flight." * 

Homer could not have known this ; neither that the 
buzzing of the fly was produced as in a wind instrument, 
by a constant current of air through the trachea. But he 
had seen, and, doubtless, meant us to remember, the mar- 
vellous strength and swiftness of the insect's flight (the 
glance of the swallow itself is clumsy and slow compared 
to the darting of common house-flies at play) ; he probably 
attributed its murmur to the wings, but in this also there 
was a type of what we shall presently find recognized in 
the name of Pallas,— the vibratory power of the air to con- 
vey sound, — while, as a purifying creature, the fly holds 
its place beside the old symbol of Athena in Egypt, the 
vulture ; and as a venomous and tormenting creature, has 
more than the strength of the serpent in proportion to its 
size, being thus entirely representative of the influence of 
* Ormerod. Natural History of Wasps. 



40 Tin: QTJ] I \ OF I HE ah:. 

the air both in purification and pestilence; and its courage 
is so notable that, strangely enough, forgetting BLomer's 
simile 1 happened to take the fly for an expression of the 
audacity of freedom in speaking of quite another subject.* 
Whether it should be called courage, or mere mechanical 
instinct, may be questioned, but assuredly no other ani- 
mal, exposed to continual danger, is so absolutely without 
sign of fear. 

36. You will, perhaps, have still patience to hear two 
instances, -not of the communication of strength, but of the 
personal agency of Athena as the air. When she comes 
down to help Diomed against Ares, she does not come to 
fight instead of him, but she takes his charioteer's place. 
" She snatched the reins, she lashed with all her force, 
And full on Mars impelled the foaming horse." 

Ares is the first to cast his spear ; then, note this, Pope 
says : — 

" Pallas opposed her hand, and caused to glance, 
Far from the car, the strong immortal lance." 

She does not oppose her hand in the Greek — the wind 
could, not meet the lance straight — she catches it in her 
hand, and throws it off. -There is no instance in which a 
lance is so parried by a mortal hand in all the Iliad, and 
it is exactly the way the wind would parry it, catching it, 
and turning it aside. If there are any good rifleshots here 
— they know something about Athena's parrying — and in 
old times the English masters of feathered artillery knew 

* See farther on, § 148, pp 152-153. 



ATHENA IN THE HEAVENS. 41 

more yet. Compare also the turning of Hector's lance 
from Achilles : Iliad xx. 439. 

37. The last instance I will give you is as lovely as it is 
subtle. Throughout the Iliad, Athena is herself the will 
or Menis of Achilles. If he is to be calmed, it is she who 
calms him ; if angered, it is she who inflames him. In 
the first quarrel with Atrides, when he stands at pause, 
with the great sword half drawn, " Athena came from 
heaven, and stood behind him, and caught him by the 

-yellow hair." Another god would have stayed his hand 
upon the hilt, but Athena only lifts his hair. " And he 
turned and knew her, and her dreadful eyes shone upon 
him." There is an exquisite tenderness in this laying her 
hand upon his hair, for it is the talisman of his life, vowed 
to his own Thessalian river if he ever returned to its 
shore, and cast upon Patroclus' pile, so ordaining that 
there should be no return. 

38. Secondly — Athena is the air giving vegetative im- 
pulse to the earth. She is the wind and the rain — and 
yet more the pure air itself, getting at the earth fresh 
turned by spade or plough — and, above all, feeding the 
fresh leaves ; for though the Greeks knew nothing about 
carbonic acid, they did know that trees fed on the air. 

ISTow, note first in this, the myth of the air getting at 
ploughed ground. You know I told you the Lord of all 
labour by which man lived was Hephaestus ; therefore 
Athena adopts a child of his, and of the Earth, — Erich- 
thonius, — literally, " the tearer up of the ground " — who 



4:2 Tin: QUEEN OF 1 HE ah:. 

is the head (though not in direct line,) of the kings of 
Allien; and having adopted him, she gives him to 1"' 
brought up by the three nymphs of the dew. Of these, 
Aglauros, the dweller in the Held-, is the envy or malice 
of the earth ; she answers nearly to the envy of Cain, the 
tiller of the ground, against his shepherd brother, in her 
own envy against her two sisters, Herse, the cloud dew, 
who is the beloved of the shepherd Mercury; and Pan- 
drosos, the diffused dew, or dew of heaven. Literally, v. m 
have in this myth the words of the blessing of Esau — 
" Thy dwelling shall be of the fatness of the earth, and of 
the dew of heaven from above." Aglauros is for her envy 
turned into a black stone ; and hers is one of the voices, — 
the other being that of Cain, — which haunts the circle of 
envy ii\ the Purgatory : — 

"Io sono Aglauro, chi divenne sasso." 
But to her two sisters, with Erichthonius, (or the hero 
Erectheus,) is built the most sacred temple of Athena in 
Athens ; the temple to their own dearest Athena — to her, 
and to the dew together : so that it was divided into two 
parts : one, the temple of Athena of the city, and the other 
that of the dew. And this expression of her power, as the 
air bringing the clew to the hill pastures, in the central 
temple of the central city of the heathen, dominant over 
the future intellectual world, is, of all the facts connected 
with her worship as the spirit of life, perhaps the most 
important. I have no time now to trace for you the 
hundredth part of the different ways in which it bears 



• ATHENA EST THE HEAVENS. 43 

both upon natural beauty, and on the best order and hap- 
piness of men's lives. I hope to follow out some of these 
trains of thought in gathering together what I have to say 
about field herbage ; but I must say briefly here that the 
great sign, to the Greeks, of the coming of spring in the 
pastures, was not, as with us, in the primrose, but in the 
various flowers of the asphodel tribe (of which I will give 
you some separate account presently) ; therefore it is that 
the earth answers with crocus flame to the cloud on Ida ; 
and the power of Athena in eternal life is written by the 
light of the asphodel on the Elysian fields. 

But farther, Athena is the air, not only to the lilies of 
the field, but to the leaves of the forest. We saw before 
the reason why Hermes is said to be the son of Maia, the 
eldest of the sister stars of spring. Those stars are called 
not only Pleiades, but Yergilise, from a word mingling the 
ideas of the turning or returning of spring-time with the 
outpouring of rain. The mother of Yirgil bearing the 
name of Maia, Yirgil himself received his name from the 
seven stars ; and he, in forming, first, the mind of Dante, 
and through him that of Chaucer (besides whatever special 
minor influence came from the Pastorals and Georgics), 
became the fountain-head of all the best literary power 
connected with the love of vegetative nature among civi- 
lized races of men. Take the fact for what it is worth; 
still it is a strange seal of coincidence, in word and in 
reality, upon the Greek dream of the power over human 
life, and its purest thoughts, in the stars of spring. But 



44 1 in. Ql n\ 0] THE All:. 

the firsl syllable of the name of Yirgil has relation also to 
another group of words, of which the English ones, virtue, 
and virgin, bring down the force to modern days. It is a 
group containing mainly the idea of " spring," or increase 
of life in vegetation — the rising of the new branch of the 
tree out of the bud, and of the new leaf ont of the ground. 
It involves, secondarily, the idea of greenness and of 
strength, but primarily, that of living increase of a new 
rod from a stock, stem, or root ; ("There shall come forth 
a rod out of the stem of Jesse ; ") and chiefly the stem of 
certain plants — either of the rose tribe, as in the budding 
of the almond rod of Aaron ; or of the olive tribe, which 
has triple significance in this symbolism, from the use of 
its oil for sacred anointing, for strength in the gymnasium, 
and for light. Hence, in numberless divided and reflected 
ways, it is connected with the power of Hercules and 
Athena: Hercules plants the wild olive, for its shade, on 
the course of Olympia, and it thenceforward gives the 
Olympic crown, of consummate honour and rest ; while 
the prize at the Panathenaic games is a vase of its oil, 
(meaning encouragement to continuance of effort) ; and 
from the paintings on these Panathenaic vases we get the 
most precious clue to the entire character of Athena. 
Then to express its propagation by slips, the trees from 
which the oil was to be taken were called "Moriai," trees 
of division (being all descendants of the sacred one in the 
Erechtheum). And thus, in one direction, we get to the 
"children like olive plants round about thy table " and 



ATHENA IN THE HEAVENS. 45 

the olive grafting of St. Paul ; while the use of the oil for 
anointing gives shief name to the rod itself of the stem of 
Jesse, and to all those who were by that name signed for 
his disciples first in Antioch. Remember, farther, since 
that name was first given, the influence of the symbol, 
both in extreme unction, and in consecration of priests 
and kings to their " divine right ; " and think, if you can 
reach with any grasp of thought, what the influence on 
. the earth has been, of those twisted branches whose leaves 
give grey bloom to the hill-sides under every breeze that 
blows from the midland sea. But, above and beyond all, 
think how strange it is that the chief Agonia of humanity, 
and the chief giving of strength from heaven for its fulfil- 
ment, should have been under its night shadow in Palestine. 

39. Thirdly — Athena is the air in its power over the sea. 

On the earliest Panathenaic vase known — the " Burgon" 
vase in the British Museum — Athena has a dolphin on her 
shield. The dolphin has two principal meanings in Greek 
symbolism. It means, first, the sea; secondarily, the 
ascending and descending course of any of the heavenly 
bodies from one sea horizon to another — the dolphins' 
arching rise and replunge (in a summer evening, out of 
calm sea, their black backs roll round with exactly the 
slow motion of a water-wheel ; but I do not know how 
far Aristotle's exaggerated account of their leaping or 
their swiftness has any foundation,) being taken as a type 
of the emergence of the sun or stars from the sea in the 
east, and plunging beneath in the west. Hence, Apollo, 



■N THE QUE] E AIR. 

when in his personal power he crosses the sea, leading his 
CretaD colonists to Pytho, takes tlic foim of a < 1« »1 j »1 1 i n, 

1m •■•..! i ii- Apollo I 'el I'll iii in.-, and names the founded colony 
•• Delphi." The lovely drawing of the Delphic Apollo on 
thehydria of the Vatican (Le Normand and De Witte, vol. 
ii. p. 6), gives the entire conception of this myth. Again, 
the beautiful coins of Tarentum represent Taras coming 
to found the city, riding on a dolphin, whose leaps and 
plunges have partly the rage of the sea in them, and partly 
the spring of the horse, because the splendid riding of the 
Taren tines had made their name proverbial in Magna 
Grseeia. The story of Arion is a collateral fragment of 
the same thought ; and, again, the plunge before their 
transformation, of the ships of iEneas. Then, this idea 
of career upon, or conquest of the sea, either by the crea- 
tures themselves, or by dolphin-like ships, (compare the 
Merlin prophecy, — 

"They shall ride 
Over ocean wide 
With hempen bridle, and horse of tree,)" 

connects itself with the thought of undulation, and of the 
wave-power in the sea itself, which is always expressed by 
the serpentine bodies either of the sea-gods or of the sea- 
horse ; and when Athena carries, as she does often in later 
work, a serpent for her shield-sign, it is not so much the 
repetition other own aegis-snakes as the farther expression 
of her power over the sea-wave; which, finally, Virgil 
gives in its perfect unity with her own anger, in the 
approach of the serpents against Laocoon from the sea ; 



ATHENA EST THE HEAVENS. 47 

and then, finally, when her own storm-power is fully put 
forth on the ocean also, and the madness of the aegis-snake 
is given to the wave-snake, the sea-wave becomes the 
devouring hound at the waist of Scylla, and Athena takes 
Scylla for her helmet-crest; while yet her beneficent and 
essential power on the ocean, in making navigation possi- 
ble, is commemorated in the Panathenaic festival tjy her 
peplus being carried to the Erechtheum suspended from 
the mast of a ship. 

In Plate ex v. of vol. ii., Le Normand, are given two 
sides of a vase, which, in rude and childish way, assembles 
most of the principal thoughts regarding Athena in this 
relation. In the first, the sunrise is represented by the 
ascending chariot of Apollo, foreshortened ; the light is 
supposed to blind the eyes, and no face of the god is seen 
(Turner, in the Ulysses and Polyphemus sunrise, loses the 
form of the god in light, giving the chariot-horses only ; 
rendering in his own manner, after 2,200 years of various 
fall and revival of the arts, precisely the same thought as 
the old Greek potter). He ascends out of the sea ; but 
the sea itself has not yet caught the light. In the second 
design, Athena as the morning breeze, and Hermes as the 
morning cloud, fly over the sea before the sun. Hermes 
turns back his head ; his face is unseen in the cloud, as 
Apollo's in the light ; the grotesque appearance of an ani- 
mal's face is only the cloud-phantasm modifying a frequent 
form' of the hair of Hermes beneath the back of his cap. 
Under the morning breeze, the dolphins leap from the rip- 
pled sea, arid their sides catch the light. 



4:3 'i m. Qi ] i \ 0] THE aii:. 

The coins of the Lucanian Heracleia give a fair repre- 
sentation of the helmed Athena, as imagined in later 
Gi'eek art, with the embossed Scylla. 

40. Fourthly — Athena is the air nourishing artificial 
light — unconsuming fire. Therefore, a lamp was always 
kept burning in the Erechtheum; and the torch-race 
belongs chiefly to her festival, of which the meaning is to 
show the danger of the perishing of the light even by 
excess of the air that nourishes it: and so that the race is 
not to the swift, but to the wise. The household use of 
her constant light is symbolized in the lovely passage in 
the Odyssey, where Ulysses and his son move the armour 
while the servants are shut in their chambers, and there 
is no one to hold torches for them; but Athena herself, 
"having a golden lamp," fills all the rooms with light. 
Her presence in war-strength with her favourite heroes is 
always shown by the "unwearied" fire hovering on their 
helmets and shields; and the image gradually becomes 
constant and accepted, both for the maintenance of house- 
hold watchfulness, as in the parable of the ten virgins, or 
as the symbol of direct inspiration, in the rushing wind 
and divided flames of Pentecost: but, together with this 
thought of unconsuming and constant fire, there is always 
mingled in the Greek mind the sense of the consuming by 
excess, as of the flame by the air, so also of the inspired 
creature hy its own fire (thus, again, "the zeal of thine 
house hath eaten me up" — "my zeal hath consumed me, 
because of thine enemies," and the like); and especially 



ATHENA EST THE HEAVENS. 49 

Athena has this aspect towards the truly sensual and 
bodily strength ; so that to Ares, who is himself insane 
and consuming, 'the opposite w T isclom seems to be insane 
and consuming: "All we the other gods have thee against 
us, O Jove ! when we would give grace to men ; for thou 
hast begotten the maid without a mind — the mischievous * 
creature, the doer of unseemly evil. All we obey thee, 
and are ruled by thee. Her only thou wilt not resist in 
anything she says or does, because thou didst bear her — 
consuming child as she is." 

41. Lastly — Athena is the air, conveying vibration of 
sound. 

In all the loveliest representations in central Greek art 
of the birth of Athena, Apollo stands close to the sitting 
Jupiter, singing, with a deep, quiet joyfulness, to his lyre. 
The sun is always thought of as the master of time and 
rhythm, and as the origin of the composing a.nd inventive 
discovery of melody; but the air, as the actual element 
and substance of the voice, the prolonging and sustaining 
power of it, and the symbol of its moral passion. What- 
ever in music is measured and designed, belongs therefore 
to Apollo and the Muses ; whatever is impulsive and pas- 
sionate, to Athena: hence her constant strength of voice 
or cry (as when she aids the shout of Achilles) curiously 
opposed to the dumbness of Demeter. The Apolline lyre, 
therefore, is not so much the instrument producing sound, 
as its measurer and divider by length or tension of string 
into given notes; and I believe it is, in a double connec- 
3 



50 Tin: Qi EEH OF i in: a hi. 

tion with its office as a measurer of time or motion, and its 
relation to the transit of the sun in the sky, that Hermes 
forms it from the tortoise-shell, which is tin' image of the 

dappled concave of the cloudy shy. Thenceforward all 
the limiting or restraining modes of music belong to the 
' Muses; but the passionate music is wind music, as in the 
Doric flute. Then, when this inspired music becomes 
degraded in its passion, it sinks into the pipe of Pan, and 
the double pipe of Marsyas, and is then rejected by 
Athena. The myth which represents her doing so is that 
she invented the double pipe from hearing the hiss of the 
Gorgonian serpents ; but when she played upon it, chanc- 
ing to see her face reflected in water, she saw that it 
was distorted, whereupon she threw down the flute, which 
Marsyas found. Then, the strife of Apollo and Marsyas 
represents the enduring contest between music in which 
the words and thought lead, and the lyre measures or 
melodizes them, (which Pindar means when he calls his 
hymns "kings over the lyre,") and music in which the 
words are lost, and the wind or impulse leads, — generally, 
therefore, between intellectual, and brutal, or meaning- 
less, music. Therefore, when Apollo prevails, he flays 
Marsyas, taking the limit and external bond of his shape 
from him, which is death, without touching the mere mus- 
cular strength; yet shameful and dreadful in dissolution. 

42. And the opposition of these two kinds of sound is 
continually dwelt upon by the Greek philosophers, the 
real fact at the root of all their teaching being this, — that 



ATHENA IN THE HEAVENS. 51 

true music is the natural expression of a lofty passion for 
a right cause ; that in proportion to the kingliness and 
force of any personality, the expression either of its joy or 
suffering becomes measured, chastened, calm, and capable 
of interpretation only by the majesty of ordered, beautiful, 
and worded sound. Exactly in proportion to the degree 
in which we become narrow in the cause and conception 
of our passions, incontinent in the utterance of them, feeble 
of perseverance in them, sullied or shameful in the indul- 
gence of them, their expression by musical sound becomes 
broken, mean, fatuitous, and at last impossible ; the mea- 
sured waves of the air of heaven will not lend themselves 
to expression of ultimate vice, it must be for ever sunk 
into discordance or silence. And since, as before stated, 
every work of right art has a tendency to reproduce the 
ethical state which first developed it, this, which of all the 
arts is most directly ethical in origin, is also the most direct 
in power of discipline ; the first, the simplest, the most 
effective of all instruments of moral instruction ; while in 
the failure and betrayal of its functions, it becomes the 
subtlest aid of moral degradation. Music is thus, in her 
health, the teacher of perfect order, and is the voice of the 
obedience of angels, and the companion of the course of 
the spheres of heaven ; and in her depravity she is also the 
teacher of perfect disorder and disobedience, and the Gloria 
in Excelsis becomes the Marseillaise. In the third section 
of this volume, I reprint two chapters from another essay 
of mine, (" The Cestus of Aglaia,") on modesty or measure, 



52 THE Q1 l l N 01 THE A.tE. 

and "U liberty, containing farther reference to music in 
her two powers; and I do this now, because, amongthe 
many monstrous and misbegotten fantasies which are the 
spawn of modern licence, perhaps the most impishly oppo- 
site to the truth is the conception of music which lias ren- 
dered possible the writing, by educated prisons, and, more 
strangely yet, the tolerant criticism, ofsuch words as these: 
— " This so persuasive art is the only one that has no di- 
dactic efficacy, that engenders no emotions save such as are 
■without issue on the side of moral truth, that expresses 
nothing of God, nothing of reason, nothing of human 
liberty." I will not give the author's name ; the passage 
is quoted in the Westminster Review for last January, p. 
153. 

43. I must also anticipate something of what I have to 
say respecting the relation of the power of Athena to or- 
ganic life, so far as to note that her name, Pallas, probably 
refers to the quivering or vibration of the air ; and to its 
power, whether as vital force, or communicated wave, over 
every kind of matter, in giving it vibratory movement ; 
first, and most intense, in the voice and throat of the bird ; 
which is the air incarnate; and so descending through the 
various orders of animal life to the vibrating and semi- 
voluntary murmur of the insect; and, lower still, to the 
hiss, or quiver of the tail, of the half-lunged snake and deaf 
adder ; all these, nevertheless, being wholly under the rule 
of Athena as representing either breath, or vital nervous 
power ; and, therefore, also, in their simplicity, the " oaten 



ATHENA IN THE HEAVEN'S. 56 

pipe and pastoral song," which belong to her dominion 
over the asphodel meadows, and breathe on their banks of 
violets. 

Finally, is it not strange to think of the influence of this, 
one power of Pallas in vibration ; (we shall see a singular 
mechanical energy of it presently in the serpent's motion ;) 
in the voices of war and peace? How much of the re- 
pose — how much of the wrath, folly, and misery of men, 
has literally depended on this one power of the air ; — on 
the sound of the trumpet and of the bell — on the lark's 
song, and the bee's murmur. 

44:. Such is the general conception in the Greek mind 
of the physical power of Athena. The spiritual power as- 
sociated with it is of two kinds ; — first, she is the Spirit of 
Life in material organism ; not strength in the blood only, 
but formative energy in the clay : and, secondly, she is in- 
spired and impulsive wisdom in human conduct and human 
art, giving the instinct of infallible decision, and of fault- 
less invention. 

It is quite beyond the scope of my present purpose— and, 
indeed, will only be possible for me at all after marking 
the relative intention of the Apolline myths — to trace for 
you the Greek conception of Athena as the guide of moral 
passion. But I will at least endeavor, on some near occa- 
sion,* to define some of the actual truths respecting the 
vital force in created organism, and inventive fancy in the 

* I have tried to do this in mere outline in the two following sections 
of this volume. 



5-i ] HE QUEEN 0E 1 HE All:. 

works of man, which are more or less expressed by the 
Greeks, under the personality of Athena. You wonld, 
perhaps, hardly bear with me if I endeavoured farther to 
show you — what is nevertheless perfectly true — the ana- 
logy between the spiritual power of Athena in her gentle 
ministry, yet irresistible anger, with the ministry of 
another Spirit whom we also, holding for the universal 
power of life, are forbidden, at our worst peril, to quench 
or to grieve. 

45. But, I think, to-night, you should not let me close, 
without requiring of me an answer on one vital point, 
namely, how far these imaginations of Gods — which are 
vain to us — were vain to those who had no better trust \ 
and what real belief the Greek had in these creations of 
his own spirit, practical and helpful to him in the sorrow 
of earth? I am able to answer you explicitly in this. 
The origin of his thoughts is often obscure, and we may 
err in endeavouring to account for their form of real- 
ization ; but the effect of that realization on his life is 
not obscure at all. The Greek creed was, of course, 
different in its character, as our own creed is, according to 
the class of persons who held it. The common people's 
was quite literal, simple, and happy : their idea of Athena 
was as clear as a good Roman Catholic peasant's idea of 
the Madonna. In Athens itself, the centre of thought 
and refinement, Pisistratus obtained the reins of govern- 
ment through the ready belief of the populace that a 
beautiful woman, armed like Athena, was the goddess 



ATHENA IN THE HEAVENS. 55 

herself. Even at the close of the last century some of this 
simplicity remained among the inhabitants of the Greek 
islands ; and when a pretty English lady first made her 
way into the grotto of Antiparos, she was surrounded, on 
her return, by all the women of the neighbouring village, 
believing her to be divine, and praying her to heal them 
of their sicknesses. 

46. Then, secondly, the creed of the upper classes was 
more refined and spiritual, but quite as honest, and even 
more forcible in its effect on the life. Tou might imagine 
that the employment of the artifice just referred to im- 
plied utter unbelief in the persons contriving it ; but it 
really meant only that the more worldly of them would 
play with a popular faith for their own purposes, as doubly- 
minded persons have often done since, all the while sincerely 
holding the same ideas themselves in a more abstract form ; 
while the good and unworldly men, the true Greek heroes, 
lived by their faith as firmly as St. Louis, or the Cid, or 
the Chevalier Bayard. 

4:7. Then, thirdly, the faith of the poets and artists was, 
necessarily, less definite, being continually modified by the 
involuntary action of their own fancies ; and by the neces- 
sity of presenting, in clear verbal or material form, things 
of which they had no authoritative knowledge. Their 
faith was, in some respects, like Dante's or Milton's : firm 
in general conception, but not able to vouch for every 
detail in the forms they gave it : but they went considera- 
bly farther, even in that minor sincerity, than subsequent 



56 THE QUEEN OF THE A IK. 

poets; and strove with all their might to be as near the 
truth as they could. Pindar says, quite simply, " I can- 
not think so-and-so of the Gods. It must have been this 

way — it cannot have been that way — that the thing was 
done." And as late among the Latins as the days of 
Horace, this sincerity remains. Horace is just as true 
and simple in his religion as Wordsworth ; but all power 
of understanding any of the honest classic poets has been 
taken away from most English gentlemen by the mechan- 
ical drill in verse-writing at school. Throughout the 
whole of their lives afterwards, they never can get them- 
selves quit of the notion that all verses were written as an 
exercise, and that Minerva was only a convenient word 
for the last of an hexameter, and Jupiter for the last but 
one. 

4S. It is impossible that any notion can be more fal- 
lacious or more misleading in its consequences. All great 
song, from the first day when human lips contrived sylla- 
bles, has been sincere song. "With deliberate didactic 
purpose the tragedians — with pure and native passion the 
lyrists — fitted their perfect words to their dearest faiths. 
" Operosa parvus carmina fingo." " I, little tiling that I 
am, weave my laborious songs " as earnestly as the bee 
among the bells of thyme on the Matin mountains. Yes, 
and he dedicates his favourite pine to Diana, and he 
chants his autumnal hymn to the Faun that guard- In- 
fields, and he guides the noble youths and maids of Kome 
in their choir to Apollo, and he tells the farmer's little girl 



ATHENA IN THE HEAVENS. 57 

that the Gods will love her, though she has only a handful 
of salt and meal to give them — -just as earnestly as ever 
English gentleman taught Christian faith to English youth, 
in England's truest days. 

49. Then, lastly, the creed of the philosophers or sages 
varied according to the character and knowledge of each ; 
■ — their relative acquaintance with the secrets of natural 
science — their intellectual and sectarian egotism — and 
their mystic or monastic tendencies, for there is a classic 
as well as a mediaeval monasticism. They ended in losing 
the life of Greece in play upon words ; but we owe to 
their early thought some of the soundest ethics, and the 
foundation of tfie best practical laws, yet known to man- 
kind. 

50. Such was the general vitality of the heathen creed 
in its strength. Of its direct influence on conduct, it is, 
as I said, impossible for me to speak now ; only, remem- 
ber always, in endeavouring to form a judgment of it, that 
what of good or right the heathens did, they did looking 
for no reward. The purest forms of our own religion have 
always consisted in sacrificing less things to win greater ; — 
time, to win eternity, — the world, to win the skies. The 
order, " sell that thou hast," is not given without the 
promise, — " thou shalt have treasure in heaven ;" and well 
for the modern Christian if he accepts the alternative as 
his Master left it — and does not practically read the com- 
mand and promise thus : " Sell that thou hast in the best 
market, and thou shalt have treasure in eternity also." 

3* 



5S THE QUEEN OF THE AIR. 

But the poor Greeks of the great ages expected no reward 
from heaven but honour, and no reward from earth but 
rest; — though, when, on those conditions, they patiently, 
and proudly, fulfilled their task of the granted day, an 
unreasoning instinct of an immortal benediction broke 
from their lips in song: and they, even they, had some- 
times a prophet to tell them of a land "where there is sun 
alike by day, and alike b} r night — where they shall need 
no more to trouble the earth by strength of hands for 
daily bread — but the ocean breezes blow around the 
blessed islands, and golden flowers burn on their bright 
trees for evermore." 



II. 

ATHENA KEBAMITIS.* 

{Athena in the Earthy 

Study, supplementary to the preceding lecture, of the supposed, and actual^ 
relations of Athena to the -vital force in material organism. 

51. It lias been easy to decipher approximately the 
Greek conception of the physical power of Athena in 
clond and sky, because we know ourselves what clouds 
and skies are, and what the force of the wind is in form- 
ing them. But it is not at all easy to trace the Greek 
thoughts about the power of Athena in giving life, be- 
cause we do not ourselves know clearly what life is, or in 
what way the air is necessary to it, or what there is, be- 
sides the air, shaping the forms that it is put into. And 
it is comparatively of small consequence to find out what 
the Greeks thought or meant, until we have determined 
what we ourselves think, or mean, when we translate the 
Greek w r ord for " breathing" into the Latin-English word 
" spirit." 

52. But it is of great consequence that you should fix 
in your minds — and hold, against the baseness of mere 

* " Athena, fit for being made into pottery." I coin the expression as 
a counterpart of yn irapdivia, " Clay intact." 



60 THE QUEEN OF THE ATE. 

materialism on the one hanfl, and against the fallacies of 
controversial speculation on the other — the certain and 
practical sense of this word "spirit;" — the sense in which 
you all know that its reality exists, as the newer which 
shaped yon into your shape, and by which you love, and 
hate, when you have received that shape. Ton need not 
fear, on the one hand, that either the sculpturing or the 
loving power can ever be beaten down by the philoso- 
phers into a metal, -or evolved by them into a gas : but, 
on the other hand, take care that you yourselves, in try- 
ing to elevate your conception of it, do not lose its truth 
in a dream, or even in a word. Beware always of con- 
tending for words : you will find them not easy to grasp, 
if you know them in several languages. This very word, 
which is so solemn in your mouths, is one of the most 
doubtful. . In Latin it ""means little more than breathing, 
and may mean merely accent ; in French it is not breath, 
but wit, and our neighbours are therefore obliged, even in 
their most solemn expressions, to say " wit " when we say 
" ghost." In Greek, " pneuma," the word we translate 
"ghost," means either wind or breath, and the relative 
word " psyche " has, perhaps, a more subtle power ; yet 
St. Paul's words " pneumatic body " and " psychic body " 
involve a difference in his mind which no words will ex- 
plain. But in Greek and in English, and in Saxon and 
in Hebrew, and in every articulate tongue of humanity, 
the " spirit of man " truly means his passion and virtue, 
and is stately according to the height of his conception, 
and stable according to the measure of his endurance. 



ATHENA IN THE EARTH. 61 

53. Endurance, or .patience, that is the central sign of 
spirit ; a constancy against the cold and agony m death ; 
and as, physically, it is by the burning power of the air 
that the heat of the flesh is sustained, so this Athena, 
spiritually, is the queen of all glowing virtue, the uncon- 
suming fire and inner lamp of life. And thus, as He- 
phaestus is lord of the fire of the hand, and Apollo of the fire 
of the brain, so Athena of the fire of the -heart; and as 
Hercules wears for his chief armour the skin of the demean 
lion, his chief enemy, whom he slew; and Apollo has for 
his highest.name " the Pythian," from his chief enemy, the 
Python, slain ; so Athena bears always on her breast the 
deadly face of her chief enemy slain, the Gorgonian cold, 
and venomous agony, that turns living men to stone. 

54. And so long as you have that fire of the heart within 
you, and know the reality of it, you need be under no 
alarm as to the possibility of its chemical or mechanical 
analysis. The philosophers are very humorous in their 
ecstasy of hope about it ; but the real interest of their dis- 
coveries in this direction is very small to human-kind. It 
is quite true that the tympanum of the ear vibrates under 
sound, and that the surface of the water in a ditch vibrates 
too : but the ditch hears nothing for all that ; and my 
hearing is still to me as blessed a mystery as ever, and the 
interval between the ditch and me, quite as great. If the 
trembling sound in my ears was once of the marriage-bell 
which began my happiness, and is now of the passing-bell 
which ends it, the difference between those two sounds to 



] in: QUEEN OF THE a i k. ' 

me cannot be counted by the number of concussions. There 
have been some curious speculations lately as to the con- 
veyance of mental consciousness by " brain-waves." What 
does it matter how it is conveyed ? The consciousness it- 
self is not a wave. It may be accompanied here or there 
by any quantity of quivers and shakes, up or down, of any- 
thing you can find in the universe that is shakeable — what 
is that to me ? My friend is dead, and my — according to 
modern views — vibratory sorrow is not one whit less, or 
less mysterious, to me, than my old quiet one. 

55. Beyond, and entirely unaffected by, any questionings 
of this kind, there are, therefore, two plain facts which we 
should all know : first, that there is a power which gives 
their several shapes to things, or capacities of shape ; and, 
secondly, a power which gives them their several feelings, 
or capacities of feeling ; and that we can increase or de- 
stroy both of these at our will. By care and tenderness, 
we can extend the range of lovely life in plants and ani- 
mals ; by our neglect and cruelty, we can arrest it, and 
bring pestilence in its stead. Again, by right discipline 
we can increase our strength of noble will and passion, or 
destroy both. And whether these two forces are local con- 
ditions of the elements in which they appear, or are part 
of a great force in the universe, out of which the}'' are 
taken, and to which they must be restored, is not of the 
slightest importance to us in dealing with them; neither 
is the manner of their connection with light and air. 
What precise meaning we ought to attach to expressions 



ATHENA IN THE EARTH. 63 

such as that of the prophecy to the four winds that the dry 
bones might be breathed upon, and might live, or why the 
presence of the vital power should be dependent on the 
chemical action of the air, and its awful passing away 
materially signified by the rendering up of that breath or 
ghost, we cannot at present know, and need not at any 
time dispute. What we assuredly know is that the states 
of life and death are different, and the first more desirable 
than the other, and by effort attainable, whether we un- 
derstand being " born of the spirit " to signify having the 
breath of heaven in our flesh, or its power in our hearts. 

56. As to its power on the body, I will endeavor to tell 
you, having been myself much led into studies involving 
necessary inference both to natural science and mental 
phenomena, what, at least, remains to us after science has 
done its worst ; — what the Myth of Athena, as a Forma- 
tive and Decisive power — a Spirit of Creation and Voli- 
tion, must eternally mean for all of us. 

57. It is now (I believe I may use the strong word) 
" ascertained" that heat and motion are fixed in quantity, 
and measurable in the portions that we deal with. "We 
can measure out portions of power, as we can measure por- 
tions of space ; while yet, as far as we know, space may be 
infinite, and force infinite. There may be heat as much 
greater than the sun's, as the sun's heat is greater than a 
candle's ; and force as much greater than the force by 
which the world swings, as that is greater than the force 
by which a cobweb trembles. Now, on heat and force, 



04; i in; Ql i i IN OF THE ah:. 

life is inseparably dependent; and I believe, also, on a 
form of substance, which the philosophers call "proto- 
plasm." 1 wish they would use English instead of Greek 
words. When I want to know why a leaf is green, they 
tell me it is coloured by " chlorophyll," which at first sounds 
very instructive; but if they would only say plainly that 
a leaf is coloured green by a thing which is called "green 
leaf," we should see more precisely how far we had got. 
However, it is a curious fact that life is connected with a 
cellular structure called protoplasm, or, in English, "first 
stuck together :" whence, conceivably through deutero- 
plasms, or second stickings, and tritoplasms, or third stick- 
ings,* we reach the highest plastic phase in the human 
pottery, which differs from common chinaware, primarily, 
by a measurable degree of heat, developed in breathing, 
which it borrows from the rest of the universe while it 
lives, and which it as certainly returns to the rest of the 
universe, when it dies. 

58. Again, with this heat certain assimilative powers 
are connected, which the tendency of recent discovery is to 

* Or, perhaps, we may be indulged with one consummating gleam 
of "glycasrn" — visible "Sweetness," — according to the good old 
monk " Full moon," or " All moonshine." I cannot get at his original 
Greek, but am content with M. Durand's clear French (Manuel d'lco- 
nographie Chretienne. Paris, 1845) : — " Lorsque vous aurez fait le 
proplasme, et esquisse un visage, vous ferez les chairs avec le glycasmo 
dont nous avons donne la recette. Chez les vieillards, vous indiquorez 
les rides, et chez les jeunes gens, les angles des yeux. C'est ainsi quo 
Ton fait les chairs, suivant Panselinos." 



ATHENA IN THE EARTH. 65 

simplify more and more into modes of one force ; or finally 
into mere motion, communicable in various states, but not 
destructible. We will assume that science lias done its 
utmost ; and that every chemical or animal force is 
demonstrably resolvable into heat or motion, reciprocally 
changing into each other. I would myself like better, in 
order of thought, to consider motion as a mode of heat than 
heat as a mode of motion : still, granting that we have got 
thus far, we have yet to ask, What is heat ? or what 
motion? What is this " primo mobile," this transitional 
power, in which all things live, and move, and have their 
being % It is by definition something different from mat- 
ter, and we may call it as we choose—" first cause," or 
" first light," or " first heat ; " but we can show no scien- 
tific proof of its not being personal, and coinciding with 
the ordinary conception of a supporting spirit in all things. 

59. Still, it is not advisable to apply the word " spirit " 
or "breathing" to it, while it is only enforcing chemical 
affinities ; but, when the chemical affinities are brought 
under the influence of the air, and of the sun's heat, the 
formative force enters an entirely different phase. It does 
not now merely crystallize indefinite masses, but it gives 
to limited portions of matter the power of gathering, 
selectively, other elements proper to them, and binding 
these elements into their own peculiar and adopted form. 

This force, now properly called life, or breathing, or 
spirit, is continually creating its own shells of definite 
shape out of the wreck round it : and this is what I meant 



GG i in: QUI i \ or i in: aii:. 

by saying, in the "Ethics of the Dust:"— "yon may 
always stand by form against force." For the mere force 
of junction is not spirit ; but the power thai catches out of 
chaos charcoal, water, lime, or what not and fastens them 
down into a given form, is properly called " spirit ; " and 
we shall not diminish, but strengthen our conception of 
this creative energy by recognizing its presence in lower 
states of matter than our own ; — such recognition being 
enforced upon us by a delight we instinctively receive 
from all the forms of matter which manifest it ; and yet 
more, by the glorifying of those forms, in the parts of them 
that are most animated, with the colours that are pleasant- 
est to our senses. The most familiar instance of this is 
the best, and also the most wonderful : the blossoming of 
plants. 

GO. The Spirit in the plant, — that is to say, its power 
of gathering dead matter out of the wreck round it, and 
shaping it into its own chosen shape, — is of course strong- 
est at the moment of its flowering, for it then not only 
gathers, but forms, with the greatest energy. 

And where this Life is in it at full power, its form 
becomes invested with aspects that are chiefly delightful 
to our own human passions ; namely, first, with the love- 
liest outlines of shape ; and, secondly, with the niost 
brilliant phases of the primary colours, blue, yellow, and 
red or white, the unison of all ; and, to make it all more 
strange, this time of peculiar and perfect glory is associated 
with relations of the plants or blossoms to each other, 



ATHENA IN THE EARTH. 67 

correspondent to the joy of love in human creatures, and 
having the same object in the continuance of the race. 
Only, with respect to plants, as animals, we are wrong in 
speaking as if the object of this strong life were only the 
bequeathing of itself. The flower is the end or proper 
object of the seed, not the seed of the flower. The reason 
for seeds is that flowers may be ; not the reason of flowers 
that seeds may be. The flower itself is the creature 
which the spirit makes ; only, in connection with its per- 
fectness, is placed the giving birth to its successor. 

61. The main fact, then, about a flower is that it is the 
part of the plant's form developed at the moment of its 
intensest life : and this inner rapture is usually marked 
externally for us by the flush of one or more of the primary 
colours. "What the character of the flower shall be, 
depends entirely upon the portion of the plant into which 
this rapture of spirit has been put. Sometimes the life is 
put into its outer sheath, and then the outer sheath be- 
comes white and pure, and full of strength and grace ; 
sometimes the life is put into the common leaves, just 
under the blossom, and they become scarlet or purple ; 
sometimes the life is put into the stalks of the flower, and 
they flush blue ; sometimes into its outer enclosure or 
calyx ; mostly into its inner cup ; but, in all cases, the 
presence of the strongest life is asserted by characters in 
which the human sight takes pleasure, and which seem 
prepared with distinct reference to us, or rather, bear, in 
being delightful, evidence of having been produced by the 
power of the same spirit as our own. 



GS THE QUEEN OF THE All:. 

62. Ami wo arc led to feel this -til! more strongly, 
because all the distinctions of species,* botb in plants ami 
animals, appear to bave similar connection with human 
character. Whatever the origin of species may be, or how- 
ever those species, once formed, may be influence' 1 by 
external accident, the groups into which birth or accident 
reduce them have distinct relation to the spirit of man. 
It is perfectly possible, and ultimately conceivable, that 
the crocodile and the lamb may have descended from the 
same ancestral atom of protoplasm ; and that the physical 
laws of the operation of calcareous slime and of meadow 
grass, on that protoplasm, may in time have developed 
the opposite natures and aspects of the living frames ; but 
the practically important fact for us is the existence of a 
power which creates that calcareous earth itself; — which 
creates, that separately — and quartz, separately ; and gold, 
separately ; and charcoal, separately ; and then so directs 
the relation of these elements as that the gold shall destroy 
the souls of men by being yellow ; and the charcoal destroy 
their souls by being hard and bright ; and the quartz rep- 
resent to them an ideal purity ; and the calcareous earth, 
soft, shall beget crocodiles, and dry and hard, sheep ; and 

* The facts on which I am about to dwell are in nowise antagonistic 
to the theories which Mr. Darwin's unwearied and unerring investiga- 
tions are every day rendering more probable. The aesthetic relations 
of species are independent of their origin. Nevertheless, it has always 
seemed to me, in what little work I have done upon organic forms, as 
if the species mocked us by their deliberate imitation of each other 
when they met : yet did not pass one into another. 



ATHENA IN THE EAKTH. 69 

that the aspects and qualities of these two products, croco- 
diles and lambs, shall be, the one repellent to the spirit of 
man, the other attractive to it, in a quite inevitable way ; 
representing to him states of moral evil and good ; and 
becoming myths to him of destruction or redemption, and, 
in the most literal sense, " words " of God. 

63. And the force of these facts cannot be escaped from 
by the thought that there are" species innumerable, passing 
into each other by regular gradations, out of which we 
choose what we most love or dread, and say they were 
indeed prepared for us. Species are not innumerable ; 
neither are they now connected by consistent gradation. 
They touch at certain points only ; and even then are con- 
nected, when we examine them deeply, in a kind of reti- 
culated way, not in chains, but in chequers ; also, how- 
ever connected, it is but by a touch of the extremities, as 
it were, and the characteristic form of the species is entirely 
individual. The rose nearly sinks into a grass in the san- 
guisorba ; but the formative spirit does not the less clearly 
separate the ear of wheat from the dog-rose, and oscillate 
with tremulous constancy round the central forms of both, 
having each their due relation to the mind of man. The 
great animal kingdoms are connected in the same way. 
The bird through the penguin drops towards the fish, and 
the fish in the cetacean reascends to the mammal, yet 
there is no confusion of thought possible between the per- 
fect forms of an eagle, a trout, and a war-horse, in their 
relations to the elements, and to man. 



70 THE QUEEN OF THE AIR. 

64. Now we have two orders of animals to take some 
note of iii connection with Athena, and one Vast order of 
plants, which will illustrate this matter very sufficiently 
for us. 

The orders of animals are the serpent and the bird ; the 
serpent, in which the breath or spirit is less than in any 
other creature, and the earth-power greatest: — the bird, 
in which the breath or spirit is more full than in any other 
creature, and the earth power least. 

65. We will take the bird first. It is little more than 
a drift of the air brought into form by plumes ; the air is 
in all its quills, it breathes through its whole frame and 
flesh, and glows with air in its flying, like blown flame : 
it rests upon the air, subdues it, surpasses it, outraces it ; 
— is the air, conscious of itself, conquering itself, ruling 
itself. 

Also, into the throat of the bird is given the voice of the 
air. All that in the wind itself is weak, wild, useless in 
sweetness, is knit together in its song. As we may ima- 
gine the wild form of the cloud closed into the perfect form 
of the bird's wings, so the wild voice of the cloud into its 
ordered and commanded voice ; unwearied, rippling through 
the clear heaven in its gladness, interpreting all intense 
passion through the soft spring nights, bursting into acclaim 
and rapture of choir at daybreak, or lisping and twitter- 
ing among the boughs and hedges through heat of day, 
like little winds that only make the cowslip bells shake, 
and ruffle the petals of the wild rose. 



ATHENA IN THE EARTH. 71 

G6. Also, upon the plumes of the bird are put the col- 
ours of the air : on these the gold of the cloud, that can- 
not be gathered by any covetousness ; the rubies of the 
clouds, that are not the price of Athena, but are Athena ; 
the vermilion of the cloud-bar, and the flame of the cloud- 
crest, and the snow of the cloud, and its shadow, and the 
melted blue of the deep wells of the sky — all these, seized 
by the creating spirit, and woven by Athena herself into 
films and threads of plume ; with wave on wave following 
and fading along breast, and throat, and opened wings, 
infinite as the dividing of the foam and the sifting of the 
sea-sand ; — even the white down of the cloud seeming to 
flutter up between the stronger plumes, seen, but too soft 
for touch. 

And so the Spirit of the Air is put into, and upon, this 
created form; and it becomes, through twenty centuries, 
the symbol of divine help, descending, as the Fire, to speak, 
but as the Dove, to bless. 

67. Next, in the serpent, we approach the source of a 
group of myths, world-wide, founded on great and com- 
mon human instincts, respecting which I must note one 
or two points which bear intimately on all our subject. 
For it seems to me that the scholars who are at present 
occupied in interpretation of human myths have most of 
them forgotten that there are any such things as natural 
myths ; and that the dark sayings of men may be both 
difficult to read, and not always worth reading; but the 
dark sayings of nature will probably become clearer for 



r2 THE QUEEN OF THE AEB. 

the looking into, and will very certainly be worth reading 
And, indeed, all guidance to the right sense of the human 
and variable myths will probably depend on our first 
getting at the sense of the natural and invariable one& 

The dead hieroglyph may have meant this or that — the 
living hieroglyph means always the same; but remember, 
it is just as much a hieroglyph as the other; nay, more, — 
a "sacred or reserved sculpture," a tiling with an inner 
language. The serpent crest of the king's crown, or of 
the god's, on the pillars of Egypt, is a mystery ; but the 
serpent itself, gliding past the pillar's foot, is it less a 
mystery? Is there, indeed, no tongue, except the mute 
forked flash from its lips, in that running bro*ok of horror 
on the ground ? 

68., Why that horror? We all feel it, yet how imagi- 
native it is, how disproportioned to the real strength of the 
creature! There is more poison in an ill-kept drain, — in 
a pool of dish-washings at a cottage-door, than in the 
deadliest asp of Nile. Every back-yard which you look 
down into from the railway, as it carries you out by 
Vauxhall or Deptford, holds its coiled serpent : all the 
walls of those ghastly suburbs are enclosures of tank 
temples for serpen t- worship ; yet you feel no horror in 
looking down into them, as you would if you saw the 
livid scales, and lifted head. There is more venom, 
mortal, inevitable, in a single Word, sometimes, or in the 
gliding entrance of a wordless thought, than ever "vanti 
Libia con sua rena. 



ATHENA IN THE EARTH. 73 

of the creature. There are myriads lower than this, and 
more loathsome, in the scale of being ; the links between 
dead matter and animation drift everywhere unseen. 
But it is the strength of the base element that is so dread- 
ful in the serpent; it is the very omnipotence of the 
earth. That rivulet of smooth silver — how does it flow, 
think you ? It literally rows on the earth, with every 
scale for an oar; it bites the dust with the ridges of its 
body. Watch it, when it moves slowly : — A wave, but 
without wind ! a current, but with no fall ! all the body 
moving at the same instant, yet some of it to one side, 
some to another, or some forward, and the rest of the coil 
backwards ; but all with the same calm, will and equal 
way — no contraction, no extension ; one soundless, cause- 
less, march of sequent rings, and spectral procession of 
spotted dust, with dissolution in its fangs, dislocation in 
its coils. Startle it ; — the winding stream will become a 
twisted arrow ; — the wave of poisoned life will lash 
through the grass like a cast lance.* It scarcely breathes 
with its one lung (the other shrivelled and abortive) ; it is 
passive to the sun and shade, and is cold or hot like a 

* I cannot understand this swift forward motion of serpents. The 
seizure of prey by the constrictor, though invisibly swift, is quite sim- 
ple in mechanism; it is simply the return to its coil of . an opened 
watch-spring, and is just as instantaneous. But the steady and con- 
tinuous motion, without a visible fulcrum (for the whole body moves at 
the same instant, and I have often seen even small snakes glide as fast 
as I could walk), seems to involve a vibration of the scales quite too 
rapid to be conceived. The motion of the erest and dorsal fin of 
4 



7± THE QUEEN OF THE All:. 

stone : yel ,- it ran outclimb the monkey, outswim the fish, 
outleap the zebra, outwrestle the athlete, and crush the 
tiger."* It is a divine hieroglyph of the demoniac 

power of the earth, — of the entire earthly nature. As 
the bird is the clothed power of the air, so this is 
the clothed power of the dust; as the bird the sym- 
bol of the spirit of life, so this of the grasp and sting 
of death. 

69. Hence the continual change in the interpretation 
put upon it in various religions. As the worm of corrup- 
tion, it is the mightiest of all adversaries of the gods — the 
special adversary of their light and creative power— 
Python against Apollo. As the power of the earth 
against the air, the giants are serpent-bodied in the 
Giganto-machia ; but as the power of the earth upon the 
seed — consuming it into new life ("that which thou 
sowest is not quickened except it die") — serpents sustain 
the chariot of the spirit of agriculture. 

TO. Yet, on the other hand, there is a power in the 
earth to take away corruption, and to purify, (hence the 
very fact of burial, and many uses of earth, only lately 
known); and in this sense, the serpent is a healing 

the hippocampus, which is one of the intermediate types between 
serpent and fish, perhaps gives some resemblance of it, dimly visible, 
for the quivering turns the fin into a mere mist. The entrance of the 
two barbs of a bee's sting by alternate motion, " the teeth of one barb 
acting as a fulcrum for the other," must be something like the serpent 
motion on a small scale. 
* Richard Owen. 



ATEENA W THE EAKTH. 75 

spirit, — the representative of iEsculapius, and of Ilygieia ; 
and is a sacred earth-type in the temple of the Dew ; — 
being there especially a symbol of the native earth of 
Athens ; so that its departure from the temple was a sign 
to the Athenians that they were to leave their homes. 
And then, lastly, as there is a strength and healing in the 
earth, no less than the strength of air, so there is con- 
ceived to be a wisdom of earth no less than a wisdom of 
the spirit ; and when its deadly power is killed, its 
guiding power becomes, true ; so that the Python serpent 
is killed at Delphi, where yet the oracle is from the breath 
of "the earth. 

71. You must remember, however, that in this, as in 
every other instance, I take the myth at its central time. 
This is only the meaning of the serpent to the Greek 
mind which could conceive an Athena. Its first meaning 
to the nascent eyes of men, and its continued influence 
over degraded races, are subjects of the most fearful mys- 
tery. Mr. Fergusson has just collected the principal evi- 
dence bearing on the matter in a work of very great value, 
and if you read his opening chapters, they will put you in 
possession of the circumstances needing chiefly to be con- 
sidered. I cannot touch upon any of them here, except 
only to point out that, though the doctrine of the so-called 
"corruption of human nature," asserting that there is 
nothing but evil in humanity, is just as blasphemous and 
false as a doctrine of the corruption of physical nature 
would be, asserting there was nothing but evil in the 



7>; i in qi i i n "i i in", ath. 

earth, — there is yet the clearest evidence of a disease, 
plague, or cretinous imperfection of development, hitherto 
allowed to prevail against the greater pari of the races of 
men; and this in monstrous ways, more full of mystery 
than the serpent-being itself. I have gathered for you to- 
night only instances of what is beautiful in Greek reli- 
gion ; but even in its best time there were deep corrup- 
tions in other phases of it, and degraded forms of many of 
its deities, all originating in a misunderstood worship of 
the principle of life ; while in the religions of lower races, 
little else than these corrupted forms of devotion can be 
found ; — all having a strange and dreadful consistency 
with each other, and infecting Christianity, even at its 
strongest periods, with fatal terror of doctrine, and ghast- 
liness of symbolic conception, passing through fear into 
frenzied grotesque, and thence into sensuality. 

In the Psalter of St. Louis itself, half of its letters are 
twisted snakes ; there is scarcely a wreathed ornament, 
employed in Christian dress, or architecture, which cannot 
be traced back to the serpent's coil ; and there is rarely a 
piece of monkish decorated writing in the world, that is 
not tainted with some ill-meant vileness of grotesque — 
nay, the very leaves of the twisted ivy-pattern of the four- 
teenth century can be followed back to wreaths for the fore- 
heads of bacchanalian gods. And truly, it seems to me, 
as I gather in my mind the evidences of insane religion, 
degraded art, merciless war, sullen toil, detestable pleas- 
ure, and vain or vile hope, in which the nations of the 



ATHENA IN THE EAKTH. 77 

world have lived since first they could bear record of 
themselves — it seems to me, I say, as if the race itself 
were still half-serpent, not extricated yet from its clay; 
a lacertine breed of bitterness — the glory of it emaciate 
with cruel hunger, and blotted with venomous stain : and 
the track of it, on the leaf a glittering slime, and in the 
sand a useless furrow. 

72. There are no myths, therefore, by which the mor- 
al state and fineness of intelligence of different races 
can be so deeply tried or measured, as by those of the ser- 
pent and the bird ; both of them having an especial rela- 
tion to the kind of remorse for sin, or grief in fate, of. 
which the national minds that spoke by them had been 
capable. The serpent and vulture are alike emblems of 
immortality and purification among races which desired 
to be immortal and pure: and as they recognize their own 
misery, the serpent becomes to them the scourge of the 
Furies, and the vulture finds its eternal prey in their 
breast. The bird long contests among the Egyptians with 
the still received serpent symbol of power. But the Dra- 
conian image of evil is established in the serpent Apap ; 
while the bird's wings, with the globe, become part of a 
better symbol of deitj^, and the entire form of the vulture, 
as an emblem of purification, is associated with the earli- 
est conception of Athena: In the type of the dove with 
the olive branch, the conception of the spirit of Athena in 
renewed life prevailing over ruin, is embodied for the 
whole of futurity; while the Greeks, to whom, in a hap- 



< s Tin: QUEEN OF THE All;. 

pier climate and higher Life than that oi Egypt, the ral- 

iinv -vuiIm.] of cleansing became unintelligible, took the 
eagle, instead, for their hieroglyph of supreme spiritual 
energy, and it thenceforward retains its hold on the hu- 
man imagination, till it is established among Christian 
myths as the expression of .the most exalted form of evan- 
gelistic teaching. The special relation of Athena to her 
favourite bird we will trace presently: the peacock of 
Hera, and dove of Aphrodite, are comparatively unimpor- 
tant myths : but the bird power is soon made entirely hu- 
man by the Greeks in their flying angel of victory (par- 
tially human, with modified meaning of evil, in the Har- 
py and Siren) ; and thenceforward it associates itself with 
the Hebrew cherubim, and has had the most singular in- 
fluence on the Christian religion by giving its wino-s to 
render the conception of angels mysterious and untenable, 
and check rational endeavour to determine the nature of 
subordinate spiritual agency; while yet it has given to 
that agency a vague poetical influence of the highest 
value in its own imaginative way. 

73. But with the early serpent worship there was asso- 
ciated another— that of the groves— of which you will 
also find the evidence exhaustively collected in Mr. Fer- 
gusson's work. This tree-worship may have taken a dark 
form when associated with the Draconian one; or opposed, 
as in Judea, to a purer faith; but in itself, I believe it 
was always healthy, and though it retains little definite 
hieroglyphic power, in subsequent religion, it becomes, 



ATHENA IN THE EARTH. 79 

instead of symbolic, real ; the flowers and trees are them- 
selves beheld and beloved with a half-worshipping delight, 
which is always noble and healthful. 

And it is among the most notable indications of the 
volition of the animating power, that we find the ethical 
signs of good and evil set on these also, as well as upon 
animals ; the venom of the serpent, and in some respects 
its image also, being associated even with the passionless 
growth of the leaf out of the ground; while the distinc- 
tions of species seem appointed with more definite ethical 
address to the intelligence of man as their material pro- 
ducts become more useful to him. 

74. I can easily show this, and, at the same time, make 
clear the relation to other plants of the flowers which espe- 
cially belong to Athena, by examining the natural myths 
in the groups of the plants which would be used at any 
country dinner, over which Athena would, in her simplest 
household authority, cheerfully rule, here, in England. 
Suppose Horace's favourite dish of beans, with the bacon ; 
potatoes; some savoury stuffing of onions and herbs with 
the meat ; celery, and a radish or two, with the cheese ; 
nuts and apples for dessert, and brown bread. 

75. The beans are, from earliest time, the most impor- 
tant and interesting of the seeds of the great tribe of 
plants from which came the Latin and French name for 
all kitchen vegetables, — things that are gathered with the 
hand — podded seeds that cannot be reaped, or beaten, or 
shaken down, but must be gathered green. "Legumi- 



v " THE Ql M \ 03 i in All:. 

nous" plants, ;ill of them having flowers like butterflies, 
seeds in (frequently pendent) pods, — "lsetum siliqua quas- 
sante legumen " — smooth and tender leaves, divided into 
many minor ones; — strange adjuncts of tendril, for climb- 
ing (and sometimes of thorn); — exquisitely sweet, yet 
pure, scents of blossom, and almost always harmless, if 
not serviceable, seeds. It is, of all tribes of plants, the 
most definite; its blossoms being entirely limited in their 
parts, and not passing into other forms. It is also the 
most usefully extended in range and scale; familiar in the 
height of the forest — acacia, laburnum, Judas-tree ; familiar 
in the sown field — bean and vetch and pea; familiar in 
the pasture — in every form of clustered clover and sweet 
trefoil tracery; the most entirely serviceable and human 
of all orders of plants. 

76. Next, in the potato, we have the scarcely innocent 
underground stem of one of a tribe set aside for evil; 
having the deadly nightshade for its queen, and including 
the henbane, the witch's mandrake, and the worst natural 
curse of modern civilization — tobacco.* And the strange 
thing about this tribe is, that though thus set aside for evil, 
they are not a group distinctly separate from those that 
are happier in function. There is nothing in other tribes 
of plants like the form of the bean blossom; but there is 
another family with forms and structure closely connected 

* It is not easy to estimate the demoralizing effect on the- youth of 
Europe of the cigar, in enabling them to pass their time happily in 
idleness. 



ATHENA IN THE EARTH. 81 

with this venomous one. Examine the purple and yellow 
bloom of the common hedge nightshade; you will find it 
constructed exactly like some of the forms of the cycla- 
men; and, getting this clue, you will find at last the 
whole poisonous and terrible group to be — sisters of the 
primulas ! 

The nightshades are, in fact, primroses with a curse 
upon them ; and a sign set in their- petals, by which the 
deadly and condemned flowers may always be known from 
the innocent ones, — that the stamens of the nightshades 
are between the lobes, and of the primulas, opposite the 
lobes, of the corolla. 

77. Next, side by side, in the celery and radish, you 
have the two great groups of umbelled and cruciferous 
plants ; alike in conditions of rank among herbs : both 
flowering in clusters; but the umbelled group, fiat, the 
crucifers, in spires : — both of them mean and poor in the 
blossom, and losing what beauty they have by too close 
crowding: — both of them having the most curious influ- 
ence on human character in the temperate zones of the 
earth, from the days of the parsley crown, and hemlock 
drink, and mocked Euripidean chervil, until now: but 
chiefly among the northern nations, being especially plants 
that are of some humble beauty, and (the crucifers) of end- 
less use, when they are chosen and cultivated; but that 
run to wild waste, and are the signs of neglected ground, in 
their rank or ragged leaves, and meagre stalks, and pursed 
or podded seed clusters. Capable, even under cultivation, 
4* 



82 THE QUEEN "1 THE Alii. 

of no perfect beauty, though reaching some subdued 
delightfulness in the lady's smock and the wallflower; for 
the most part, they have every floral quality meanly, and 
in vain, — they are white, without purity; golden, without 
preciousness ; redundaut, without richness; divided, with- 
out fineness; massive, without strength; and slender, 
without grace. Yet think over that useful vulgarity of 
theirs ; and of the relations of German and English peas- 
ant character to its food of kraut and cabbage, (as of Arab 
character to its food of palm-fruit,) and you will begin to 
feel what purposes of the forming spirit are in these dis- 
tinctions of species. 

78. Next we take the nuts and apples, — the nuts repre- 
senting one of the groups of catkined trees, whose blossoms 
are only tufts and dust ; and the other, the rose tribe, in 
which fruit and flower alike have been the types, to the 
highest races of men, of all passionate temptation, or pure 
delight, from the coveting of Eve to the crowning of the 
Madonna, above the 

" Rosa'sempiterna, 
Che si dilata, rigrada, e ridole 
Odor di lode al Sol." 

We have no time now for these, we must go on to the 
humblest group of all, yet the most wonderful, that of the 
grass, which has given us our bread ; and from that we 
will go back to the herbs. 

79. The vast family of plants which, under rain, make 
the earth green for man, and, under sunshine, give him 



ATHENA. IN THE HEAVENS. 83 

bread, and, in their springing in the early year, mixed with 
their native flowers, have given us (far more than the new 
leaves of trees) the thought and word of " spring," divide 
themselves broadly into three great groups — the grasses, 
sedges, and rushes. The grasses are essentially a clothing 
for healthy and pure ground, watered by occasional rain, 
but in itself dry, and fit for all cultivated pasture and corn. 
They are distinctively plants with round and jointed stems, 
which have long green flexible leaves, and heads of seed, 
independently emerging from them. The sedges are 
essentially the clothing of waste and more or less poor or 
uncultivable soils, coarse in their structure, frequently 
triangular in stem — hence called " acute " by Virgil — and 
with their heads of seed not extricated from their leaves. 
JSTow, in both the sedges and grasses, the blossom has a 
common structure, though undeveloped in the sedges, but 
composed always of groups of double husks, which have 
mostly a spinous process in the centre, sometimes project- 
ing into a long awn or beard ; this central process, being 
characteristic also of the ordinary leaves of mosses, as if 
a moss were a kind of ear of corn made permanently green 
on the ground, and with a new and distinct fructification. 
But the rushes differ wholly from the sedge and grass in 
their blossom structure. It is not a dual cluster, but a 
twice threefold one, so far separate from the grasses, and 
so closely connected with a higher order of plants, that I 
think you will find it convenient to group the rushes at 
once with that higher order, to which, if you will for the 



v 1 J hi: Ql i : 1 . n OF THE am:. 

presenl lei me give the general name of Drosida?, or dew- 
plants, it will enable me to say .what I have to say of them 
much more shortly and clearly. 

80. These Drosidas, then, are plants delighting in inter- 
rupted moisture — moisture which comes either partially 
or at certain seasons — into dry ground. They are not 
water-plants ; but the signs of water resting among dry 
])laces. Many of the true water-plants have triple blos- 
soms, with a small triple calyx holding thern ; in the 
Drosidee, the floral spirit passes into the calyx also, and 
the entire flower becomes a six-rayed star, bursting out of 
the stem laterally, as if it were the first of flowers, aud 
had made its way to the light by force through the un- 
willing green. They are often required to retain moisture 
or nourishment for the future blossom through long times 
of drought; and this they do in bulbs underground, of 
which some become a rude and simple, but most whole- 
some, food for man. 

81. So now, observe, you are to divide the whole family 
of the herbs of the field into three great groups — Drosidse, 
Carices,* Graminese — dew-plants, sedges, and grasses. 
Then, the Drosidse are divided into five great orders — 
lilies, asphodels, amaryllids, irids, and rushes. No tribes of 
flowers have had so great, so varied, or so healthy an 
influence on man as this great group of Drosidoe, depending, 

* I think Carex will be found ultimately better than Cyperus for the 
generic name, being the Virgilian word, and representing a larger sub- 
species. 



ATHENA IN THE EARTH. 85 

not so much on the whiteness of some of their blossoms, 
or the radiance of others, as on the strength and delicacy 
of the substance of their petals; enabling them to take 
forms of faultless elastic curvature, either in cups, as the 
crocus, or expanding bells, as the true lily, or heath-like 
bells, as the hyacinth, or bright and perfect stars, like the 
star of Bethlehem, or, when they are affected by the strange 
reflex of the serpent nature which forms the labiate group 
of all flowers, closing into forms of exquisitely fantastic 
symmetry in the gladiolus. Put by their side their 
Nereid sisters, the water-lilies, and you have in them the 
origin of the loveliest forms of ornamental design, and the 
most powerful floral myths yet recognized among human 
spirits, born by the streams of Ganges, Nile, Arno, and 
Avon., 

82. For consider a little what each of those five tribes* 
has been to the spirit of man. First, in their nobleness : 
the Lilies gave the lily of the Annunciation ; the Aspho- 
dels, the flower of the Elysian fields ; the Irids, the fleur- 
de-lys of chivalry ; and the Amaryllids, Christ's lily of the 
field : while the rush, trodden always under foot, became 
the emblem of humility. Then take each of the tribes, and 
consider the extent of their lower influence. Perdita's 

* Take this rough distinction of the four tribes : — Lilies, superior 
ovary, white seeds ; Asphodels, superior ovary, black seeds ; Irids, 
inferior ovary, style (typically) rising into central crest ; Amaryllids, 
inferior ovary, stamens (typically) joined in central cup. Then tho 
rushes are a dark group, through which they stoop to the grasses. 



80 i m Ql i i \ OF 'i in. ah:. 

"The crown imperial, lilies of all kindte," an' tin' first 
tribe; which, giving the type of perfect purity in the 
Madonna's lily, have, by their lovely form, influenced the 

(iii in- decorative design of Italian sacred art; while orna- 
ment of war was continually enriched by the curves of the 
triple petals of the Florentine " giglio," and French flenr- 
de-lys ; so that it is impossible to count their influence for 
good in the middle ages, partly as a symbol of womanly 
character, and partly of the utmost brightness and refine- 
ment of chivalry in the city which was the flower of cities. 

Afterwards, the group of the turban-lilies, or tulips, did 
some mischief, (their splendid stains having made them 
the favourite caprice of florists ;) but they may be pardoned 
all such guilt for the pleasure they have given in cottage 
gardens, and are yet to give, when lowly life may again 
be possible among us ; and the crimson bars of the tulips 
in their trim beds, with their likeness in crimson bars of 
morning above them, and its dew glittering heavy, globed 
in 'their glossy cups, may be loved better than the gray 
nettles of the ash heap, under gray sky, unveined by ver- 
milion or by gold. 

83. The next great group, of the Asphodels, divides itself 
also into two principal families ; one, in which the flowers 
are like stars, and clustered characteristically in balls, 
though opening sometimes into looser heads; and the 
other, in which the flowers are in long bells, opening sud- 
denly at the lips, and clustered in spires on a long stem, or 
drooping from it, when bent by their weight. 



ATHENA IN THE EAKTn. 87 

The star-group, of the squills, garlics, and onions, has 
always caused me great wonder. I cannot understand 
why its' beauty, and serviceableness, should have been as- 
sociated with the rank scent which has been really among 
the most powerful means of degrading peasant life, and 
separating it from that of the higher classes. 

The belled group, of the hyacinth and convallaria, is as 
delicate as the other is coarse : the unspeakable azure light 
along the ground of the wood hyacinth in English spring ; 
the grape hyacinth, which is in south France, as if a cluster 
of grapes and a hive of honey had "been distilled and com- 
pressed together into one small boss of celled and beaded 
blue ; the lilies of the valley everywhere, in each sweet 
and wild recess of rocky lands; — count the influences of 
these on childish and innocent life ; then measure the 
mythic power of the hyacinth and asphodel as connected 
with Greek thoughts of immortality ; finally take their 
useful and nourishing power in ancient and modern peasant 
life, and it will be strange if you do not feel what fixed 
relation exists between the agency of the creating spirit in 
these, and in us who live by them. 

84. It is impossible to bring into any tenable compass 
for our present purpose, even hints of the human influ- 
ence of the two remaining orders of Amaryllids and 
Irids ; — only note this generally, that while these in north- 
ern countries share with the Primulas the fields of spring, 
it seems that in Greece, the primnlacese are not an ex- 
tended tribe, while the crocus, narcissus, and Amaryllis 



8S THE Ql il\ 01 l in: All;. 

latea, the "lily of the field" .1 suspect also mat :ho 
flower whose name we translate " violel " was in trnth an 
,r '-' represented to the Greek the first coming of the 
breath of life on the renewed herbage; and became in 
Lis thoughts the true embroidery of the saffron robe of 
Athena. Later in the year, the dianthus (which, though 
belonging to an entirely different- race of plants, has yet 
a strange look of having been made out of the grasses by 
turning the sheath-membrane at the root of their leaves 
into a flower,) seems to scatter, in multitudinous families, 
its crimson stars far and wide. But the golden lilj and 
crocus, together with the asphodel, retain always the old 
Greek's fondest thoughts— they are only " golden " flowers 
that are to burn on the trees, and float on the streams of 
paradise. 

85. I have but one tribe of plants more to note at our 
country feast— the savoury herbs ; but* must go a little 
out of my way to come at them rightly. All flowers 
whose petals are fastened together, and most of those 
whose petals are loose, are best thought of first as a 
kind of cup or tube opening at the mouth. Sometimes 
the opening is gradual, as in the convolvulus or campa- 
nula; oftener there is a distinct change of direction be- 
tween the tube and expanding lip, as in the primrose; 
or even a contraction under the lip, making the tube 
into a narrow-necked phial or vase, as in the heaths, but 
the general idea of a tube expanding into a quatrefoil, 
einquefoil, or sixfoil, will embrace most of the forms. 



ATHENA IN THE EARTH. 89 

86. Now it is easy to conceive that flowers of this 
kind, growing in close clusters, may, in process of time, 
have extended their outside petals rather than the in- 
terior ones (as the outer flowers of the clusters of many 
umbellifers actually do), and thus; elongated and vari- 
ously distorted forms have established themselves ; then 
if the stalk is attached to the side instead of the base 
of the tube, its base becomes a spur, and thus all the 
grotesque forms of the mints, violets, and larkspurs, 
gradually might be composed. But, however this may 
be, there is one great tribe of plants separate from the 
rest, and of which the influence seems shed upon the 
rest in different degrees: and these would give the im- 
pression, not so much of having been developed by 
change, as of being stamped with a character of their 
own, more or less serpentine or dragon-like. And I 
think you will find it convenient to call these generally, 
Draconidm y disregarding their present ugly botanical 
name, which I do not care even to write once — you may 
take for their principal types the Foxglove, Snapdragon, 
and Calceolaria ; and you will find they all agree in a 
tendency to decorate themselves by spots, and with bos- 
ses or swollen places in their leaves, as if they had been 
touched by poison. The spot of the Foxglove is espe- 
cially strange, because it draws the colour out of the tis- 
sue all around it, as if it had been stung, and as if the 
central colour was really an inflamed spot, with paleness 
round. Then also they carry to its extreme the deco- 



90 ] in: Ql i.i \ "i i be aii:. 

raticm by bulging or pouting the petal; — often beauti* 
fully used by other flowers in a minor degree, like the 

lu-ating "in ( it' bosses in hollow silver, as in the kalmia, 
beaten oul apparently in each petal by the stamens in- 
stead of a hammer; or the borage, pouting inwards; but 
the snapdragons and calceolarias carry it to its extreme. 

ST. Then the spirit of these Draconidae seems to pass 
more or less into other flowers, whose forms are properly 
pure vases ; but it affects some of them slightly, — others 
not at all. It never strongly affects the heaths ; never 
once the roses; but it enters like an evil spirit into the 
buttercup, and turns it into a larkspur, with a black, 
spotted, grotesque centre, and a strange, broken blue, 
gorgeous and intense, yet impure, glittering on the sur- 
face as if it were strewn with broken glass, and stained 
or darkening irregularly into red. And then at last the 
serpent charm changes the ranunculus into monkshood; 
and makes it poisonous. It enters into the forget-me-not, 
and the star of heavenly turquoise is corrupted into the 
viper's bugloss, darkened with the same strange red as 
the larkspur, and fretted into a fringe of thorn ; it enters, 
together with a strange insect-spirit, into the asphodels, 
and (though with a greater interval between the groups,) 
they change into spotted orchidese: it touches the poppy, 
it becomes a fumaria ; the iris, and it pouts into a gladi- 
olus; the lily, and it chequers itself into a snake's-head, 
and secretes in the deep of its bell, drops, not of venom 
indeed, but honey-dew, as if it were a healing serpent. 



ATHENA EST THE EARTH. 91 

For there is an iEsculapian as well as an evil serpentry 
among the Draconidse, and the fairest of them, the " erba 
della Madonna" of Ye»ice, (Lin aria Cymbalaria,) de- 
scends from the ruins it delights in to the herbage at 
their feet, and touches it; and behold, instantly, a vast 
group of herbs for healing, — all draconid in form, — spot- 
ted, and crested, and from their lip-like corollas named 
" labiates ;" full of various balm, and warm strength for 
healing, yet all of them without splendid honour or per- 
fect beauty, "ground ivies," richest when crushed under 
the foot; the best sweetness and gentle brightness of 
the robes of the field, — thyme, and marjoram, and Eu- 
phrasy. 

88. And observe, again and again, with respect to all 
these divisions and powers of plants ; it does not matter 
in the least by what ' concurrences of circumstance or 
necessity they may gradually have been developed : the 
concurrence of circumstance is itself the supreme and inex- 
plicable fact. We always come at last to a formative 
cause, which directs the circumstance, and mode of meet- 
ing it. If you ask an ordinarybotanist the reason of the 
form of a leaf, he will tell you it is a " developed tuber- 
cle," and that its ultimate form " is owing to the direc- 
tions of its vascular threads." But what directs its vascu- 
lar threads ? " They are seeking for something they 
want," he will probably answer. What made them want 
that ? What made them seek for it thus % Seek for it, in 
five fibres or in three? Seek for it, in serration, or in 



92 THE QUEEN 01 THE AEB. 

sweeping curve-. '. Seels for it. in Bervile tendrils, or im- 
petuous spraj \ Seek for it. in woollen wrinkles rough 
with stings, or in glossy surfaces,«green with pure strength, 
and winterless delight? 

89. There is no answer. But the sum of all is, that 
over the entire surface of the earth and its waters, as influ- 
enced by the power of the air under solar light, there is 
developed a series of changing forms, in clouds, plants, 
and animals, all of which have reference in their action, 
or nature, to the human intelligence that perceives them ; 
and on which, in their aspects of horror and beauty, and 
their qualities of good and evil, there is engraved a series 
of myths, or words of the forming power, which, according 
to the true passion and energy of the human race, they 
have been enabled to read into religion. And this form- 
ing power has been by all nations partly confused with 
the breath or air through which it acts, and partly under- 
stood as a creative wisdom, proceeding from the Supreme 
Deity; but entering into and inspiring all intelligences 
that work in harmony with Him. And whatever intel- 
lectual results may be in modern days obtained by regard- 
ing this effluence only as a motion of vibration, every 
formative human art hitherto, and the best states of 
human happiness and order, have depended on the appre- 
hension of its mystery (which is certain), and of its per- 
sonality, which is probable. 

90. Of its influence on the formative arts, I have a few 
words to say separately : my present business is only to 



ATHENA IN THE EAETH. 93 

interpret, as we are now sufficiently enabled to do, the 
external symbols of the myth under which it was repre- 
sented by the Greeks as a goddess of -counsel, taken first 
into the breast of their supreme Deity, then created out 
of his thoughts, and abiding closely beside him ; always 
sharing and consummating his power. 

91. And in doing this we have first to note the mean- 
ing of the principal epithet applied to Athena, " Glau- 
kopis," " with eyes full of light," the first syllable being 
connected, by its root, With words signifying sight, not 
with words signifying colour. As far as I can trace the 
colour perception of the Greeks, I find it all founded pri- 
marily on the degree of connection between colour and 
light ; the most important fact to them in the colour of 
red being its connection with fire and sunshine; so that 
" purple " is, in its original sense, " fire-colour," and the 
scarlet, or orange, of dawn, more than any other fire- 
colour. I was long puzzled by Homer's calling the sea 
purple ; and misled into thinking he meant the colour of 
cloud shadows on green sea ; whereas he really means the 
gleaming blaze of the waves under wide light. Aristotle's 
idea (partly true) is that light, subdued by blackness, 
becomes red ; and blackness, heated or lighted, also 
becomes red. Thus, a colour may be called purple 
because it is light subdued (and so death is called " pur- 
ple " or " shadowy " death) ; or else it may be called purple 
as being shade kindled with fire, and thus said of the 
lighted sea ; or even of the sun itself, when it is thought 



9-i THE Ql l l.\ 01 l in: AIR. 

of as a red luminary opposed to the whiteness of the 

moon : "' i nii-j nireos inter soles, et Candida luna? sidcra;" 
or of golden hair: "pro purpureo poenam solvens scele- 
rata capillo ;" while both ideas are modified by the influ- 
ence of an earlier form of the word, which has nothing to 
do with tire at all, but only with mixing or staining; and 
then, to make the whole group of thoughts inextricably 
complex, yet rich and subtle in proportion to their intri- 
cacy, the various rose and crimson colours of the murex- 
dye, — the crimson and purple of the poppy, and fruit of 
the palm, — and the association of all these with the hue 
of blood ; — partly direct, partly through a confusion 
between the word signifying ''slaughter" and "palm- 
fruit colour," mingle themselves in, and renew the whole 
nature of the old word ; so that, in later literature, it 
means a different colour, or emotion of colour, in almost 
every place where it occurs ; and casts forever around the 
reflection of all that has been dipped in its dyes. 

92. So that the word is really a liquid prism, and 
stream of opal. And then, last of all, to keep the whole 
history of it in the fantastic course of a dream, warped 
here and there into wild grotesque, we moderns, who 
have preferred to rule over coal-mines instead of the sea 
(and so have turned the everlasting lamp of Athena into 
a Davy's safety-lamp in the hand of Britannia, and Athe- 
nian heavenly lightning into British subterranean 
" damp"), have actually got our purple out of coal instead 
of the sea ! And thus, grotesquely, we have had enforced 



ATHENA IN THE EARTH. 95 

on us the doubt that held the old word between 
blackness and fire, and have completed the shadow, and 
the fear of it, by giving it a name from battle, :i Ma- 
genta." 

93. There is precisely a similar confusion between 
light and colour in the word used for the blue of the eyes 
of Athena — a noble confusion, however, brought about by 
the intensity of the Greek sense that the heaven is light, 
more than that it is blue. I was not thinking of this 
when I wrote, in speaking of pictorial chiaroscuro, " The 
sky is not blue colour merely : it is blue fire, and cannot be 
painted" (Mod. P. iv. p. 36); but it was this that the 
Greeks chiefly felt of it, and so " Glaukopis " chiefly 
means gray-eyed : gray standing for a pale or luminous 
blue ; but it only means, " owl-eyed " in thought of the 
roundness and expansion, not from the colour ; this breadth 
and brightness being, again, in their moral sense typical 
cf the breadth, intensity, and singleness of the sight in 
prudence (" if thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be 
full of light "). Then the actual power of the bird to see 
in twilight enters into the type, and perhaps its general 
fineness of sense. " Before the human form was adopted, 
her (Athena's) proper symbol was the owl, a bird which 
seems to surpass all other creatures in acuteness of organic 
perception, its eye being calculated to observe objects 
which to all others are enveloped in darkness, its ear to 
hear sounds distinctly, and its nostrils to discriminate efflu- 
via with such nicety that it has been deemed prophetic, 



96 THE QUEEN OF THE AIR. 

from discovering the putridity of death even in the first 
• >f disease." ' :: ' 

I cannot find anywhere an account of the first known 
occurrence of the type ; but, in the early ones on Attic 
coins, the wide round eyes are clearly the principal things 
to be made manifest. 

94. There is yet, however, another colour of great im- 
portance in the conception of Athena — -the dark blue of 
her aegis. Just as the blue or gray of her eyes was con- 
ceived as more light than colour, so her regis was dark 
blue, because the Greeks thought of this tint more as 
shade than colour, and, while they used various materials 
in ornamentation, lapislazuli, carbonate of copper, or per- 
haps, smalt, with real enjoyment of the blue tint, it was 
yet in their minds as distinctly representative of darkness 
as scarlet was of light, and, therefore, anything dark,f but 

* Payne Knight in his "Inquiry into the Symbolical Language of 
Ancient Art," not trustworthy, being little more than a mass of con- 
jectural memoranda, but the heap is suggestive, if well sifted. 

f In the breastplate and shield of Atrides the serpents and bosses are 
all of this dark colour, yet the serpents are said to be like rainbows ; 
but through all this splendour and opposition of hue, I feel distinctly 
that the literal "'splendour," with its relative shade, are prevalent in 
the conception ; . and that there is always a tendency to look through 
the hue to its cause. And in this feeling about colour the Greeks are 
separated from the eastern nations, and from the best designers of 
Christian times. I cannot find that they take pleasure in colour for its 
own sake ; it may be in something more than colour, or better ; but it 
is not in the hue itself. When Homer describes cloud breaking from a 
mountain summit, the crags became visible in light, not in colour ; he 



ATHENA IN THE EARTH. 97 

especially tne colour of heavy thunder-cloud, was de- 
scribed by the same term. The physical power of this 
darkness of the segis, fringed with lightning, is given quite 
simply when Jupiter himself uses it to overshadow Ida 
and the Plain of Troy, and withdraws it at the prayer of 
Ajax for light; and again when he grants it to be worn 

feels only their flashing out in. bright edges and trenchant shadows : 
above, the " infinite," "unspeakable" aether is torn open — but not the 
blue of it. He has scarcely any abstract pleasure iu blue, or green, or 
gold ; but only in their shade or flame. 

I have yet to trace the causes of this (which will be a long task, 
belonging to art questions, not to mythological ones) ; but it is, I 
believe, much connected with the brooding of the shadow of death over 
the Greeks without any clear hope of immortality. The restriction of 
the colour on their vases to dim red (or yellow) with black and white, 
is greatly connected with their sepulchral use, and with all the melan- 
choly of Greek tragic thought ; and in this gloom the failure of 
colour-perception is partly noble, partly base : noble, in its earnestness, 
which raises the design of Greek vases as far above the designing of 
mere colourist nations like the Chinese, as men's thoughts are above 
children's ; and yet it is partly base and earthly ; and inherently 
defective in one human faculty : and I believe it was one cause of the 
perishing of their art so swiftly, for indeed there is no decline so 
sudden, or down to such utter loss and ludicrous depravity, as the fall 
of Greek design on its vases from the fifth to the third century, B.C. 
On the other hand, the pure coloured-gift, when employed for pleasure 
only, degrades in another direction ; so that among the Indians, Chinese, 
and Japanese, all intellectual progress in art has been for ages rendered 
impossible by the prevalence of that faculty : and yet it is, as I have 
said again and again, the spiritual power of art ; and its true bright- 
ness is the essential characteristic of all healthy schools. 
5 



98 THE Q1 EEH -I i in: air. 

for a time by Apollo, wlm is hidden by ir< elmid when lie 
"strikes down Patroclus: but its spiritual power is chiefly 
expressed by a word signifying deeper shadow ; — the gloom 
of Erebus, or of our evening, which, when spoken of the 
regis, signifies, not merely the indignation of Athena, but 
the entire hiding or withdrawal of her help, and beyond 
even this, her deadliest of all hostility, — the darkness by 
which she herself deceives and beguiles to final ruin those 
to whom she is wholly adverse ; this contradiction of her 
own glory being the uttermost judgment upon human 
falsehood. Thus it is she who provokes Pandarus to the 
treachery which purposed to fulfil the rape of Helen by 
the murder of her husband in time of truce; and then the 
Greek King, holding his wounded brother's hand, proph- 
esies against Troy the darkness of the aegis which shall be 
over all, and for ever. * 

95. This, then, finally, was the perfect colour-conception 
of Athena ; — the flesh, snow-white, (the hands, feet, and 
face of marble, even when the statue was hewn roughly in 
wood); the eyes of keen pale blue, often in statues repre- 
sented by jewels; the long robe to the feet, crocus-coloured ; 
and the segis thrown over it of thunderous purple ; the 
helmet golden, (II. v. 744), and I suppose its crest also, as 
that of Achilles. 

If you think carefully of the meaning and character 
which is now enough illustrated for you in each of these 
colours ; and remember that the crocus-colour and the pur- 

* Iptjiviiv AiyiVJa iraai. — ]1. IV. 1 66. 



ATHENA IN THE EARTH. 99 

pie were both of them developments, in opposite directions, 
of the great central idea of fire-colour, or scarlet, you will 
see that this form of the creative spirit of the earth is con- 
ceived as robed in the blue, and purple, and scarlet, the 
white, and the gold, which have been recognized for the 
sacred chord of colours, from the day when the cloud 
descended on a Rock more mighty than Ida. 

96. I have spoken throughout, hitherto, of the concep- 
tion of Athena, as it is traceable in the Greek mind; not 
as it w T as rendered by Greek art. It is matter of extreme 
difficulty, requiring a sympathy at once affectionate and 
cautious, and a knowledge reaching the earliest springs of 
the religion of many lands, to discern through the imper- 
fection, and, alas ! more dimly yet, through the triumphs, 
of formative art, what kind of thoughts they were that 
appointed for it the tasks of its childhood, and watched by 
the awakening of its strength. 

The religious passion is nearly always vividest when the 
art is weakest ; and the technical skill only reaches its 
deliberate splendour when the ecstasy which gave it birth 
has passed away for ever. It is as vain an attempt to 
reason out the visionary power or guiding influence of 
Athena in the Greek heart, from anything we now read, 
or possess, of the work of Phidias, as it would be for the 
disciples of some new religion to infer the spirit of Chris- 
tianity from Titian's " Assumption." The effective vi- 
tality of the religious conception can be traced only 
through the efforts of trembling hands, and strange plea- 



100 'I HE QUEEN OF THE All:. 

sures of untanglil eyes; and the beauty of the dream can 
no more be found in the first symbols by which it is ex« 
pressed, than a child's idea of fairyland can be gathered 
from its pencil scrawl, or a girl's love for her broken doll 
explained by the defaced features. On the other hand, 
the Athena of Phidias was, in very fact, nut so much the 
deity, as the darling of the Athenian people. Her mag- 
nificence represented their pride and fondness, more than 
their piety ; and the great artist, in lavishing upon her 
dignities which might be ended abruptly by the pillage 
they provoked, resigned, apparently without regret, the 
awe of her ancient memory ; and (with only the careless 
remonstrance of a workman too strong to be proud,) even 
the perfectness of his own art. Eejoicing in the protec- 
tion of their goddess, and in their own hour of glory, the 
people of Athena robed her, at their will, with the pre- 
ciousness of ivory and gems; forgot or denied the dark- 
ness of the breastplate of judgment, and vainly bade its 
unappeasable serpents relax their coils in gold. 

97. It will take me many a day yet — if days, many or 
few, are given me — to disentangle in anywise the proud 
and practised disguises of religious creeds from the in- 
stinctive arts which, grotesquely and indecorously, yet 
with sincerity, strove to embody them, or to relate. But 
I think the reader, by help even of the imperfect indica- 
tions already given to him, will be able to follow, with a 
continually increasing security, the vestiges of the Myth 
of Athena ; and to reanimate its almost evanescent shad.-. 



ATHENA IN THE EARTH. 101 

by connecting it with the now recognized facts of existent 
nature, which it, more or less dimly, reflected and foretold, 
1 gather these facts together in brief sum. 

98. The deep of air that surrounds the earth enters into 
union with the earth at its surface, and with its waters ; 
so as to be the apparent cause of their ascending into life. 
First, it warms them, and shades, at once, staying the heat' 
of the sun's rays in its own body, but warding their force 
with its clouds. It warms and cools at once, with traffic 
of balm and frost ; so that the white wreaths are with- 
drawn from the field of the Swiss peasant by the glow of 
Libyan rock, ^t gives its own strength to the sea ; forms 
and fills every cell of its foam ; sustains the precipices, 
and designs the valleys of its waves ; gives the gleam to 
their moving under the night, and the white fire to their 
plains under sunrise ; lifts their voices along the rocks, 
bears above them the spray of birds, pencils through them 
the dimpling of unfooted sands. It gathers out of them a 
portion in the hollow of its hand : dyes, with that, the 
hills into dark blue, and their glaciers with dying rose ; 
inlays with that, for sapphire, the dome in which it has to 
set the cloud ; shapes out of that the heavenly flocks : 
divides them, numbers, cherishes, bears them on its bosom, 
calls them to their journeys, waits by their rest ; feeds 
from them the brooks that cease not, and strews with 
them the dews that cease. It spins and weaves their 
fleece into wild tapestry, rends it, and renews ; and flits 
and flames, and whispers, among the golden threads, 



102 



THE QUEEN OF THE All:. 



thrilling them with a plectrum of strange fire that tra- 
verses them to and fro, and is enclosed in them like life. 

It enters into the surface of the earth, subdues it, and 
falls together with it into fruitful dust, from which can be 
moulded flesh ; it joins itself, in dew, to the substance of 
adamant; and becomes the green leaf out of the dry 
ground ; it enters into the separated shapes of the earth 
it has tempered, commands the ebb and flow of the cur- 
rent of their life, fills their limbs with its own lightness, 
measures their existence by its indwelling pulse, moulds 
upon their lips the words by which one soul can be known 
to another; is to them the hearing of the ear, and the 
beating of the heart ; and, passing away, leaves them to 
the peace that hears and. moves no more. 

99. This was the Athena of the greatest people of the 
days of old. And opposite to the temple of this Spirit 
of the breath, and life-blood, of man and of beast, stood, 
on the Mount of Justice, and near the chasm which was 
haunted by the goddess-Avengers, an altar to a God un- 
known ; — proclaimed at last to them, as one who, indeed, 
gave to all men, life, and breath, and all things; and rain 
from heaven, filling their hearts with food- and gladness ; 
— a God who had made of one blood all nations of men 
who dwell on the face of all the earth, and had determined 
the times of their fate, and the bounds of their habitation. 

100. We ourselves, fretted here in our narrow days, 
know less, perhaps, in very deed, than they, what manner 
of spirit we are of, or what manner of spirit we ignorantry 



ATHENA EST THE EAKTH. . ' 103 

worship. Have we, indeed, desired the Desire of all na- 
tions ? and will the Master whom we meant to seek, and 
the Messenger in whom we thought we delighted, confirm, 
when He comes to His temple, — or not find in its midst, 
— the tables heavy with gold for bread, and the seats that 
are bought with the price of the dove ? Or is our own 
land also to be left by its angered Spirit ; — left among 
those, where sunshine vainly sweet, and passionate folly 
of storm, waste themselves in the silent places of know- 
ledge that has passed away, and of tongues that have 
ceased ? 

This only we may discern assuredly : this, every true 
light of science, every mercifully-granted power, every 
wisely-restricted thought, teach us more clearly day by 
day, that in the heavens above, and the earth beneath, 
there is one continual and omnipotent presence of help, 
and of peace, for all men who know that they Live, and 
remember that they Die. 



III. 

ATHENA EEGANE* 

{Athena in the Heart.) 

Various Notes relating to the Conception of Athena as the Direc- 
tress of the Imagination and Will. 

101. I have now only a few words to say, bearing on 
what seems to me present need, respecting the third func- 
tion of Athena, conceived as the directress of human 
passion, resolution, and labour. 

Few words, for I am not yet prepared to give accurate 
distinction between the intellectual rule of Athena and 
that of the Muses : but, broadly, the Muses, with their 
king, preside over meditative, historical, and poetic arts, 
whose end is the discovery of light or truth, and the crea- 
tion of beauty : but Athena rules over moral passion, and 
practically useful art. She does not make men learned, 
but prudent and subtle : she does not teach them to make 
their work beautiful, but to make it right, 

In different places of my writings, and through many 
years of endeavour to define the laws of art, I have in- 
sisted on tliis rightness in work, and on its connection 

* " Athena the worker, or having rule over work." The name was 
first given to her by the Athenians. 

< 



ATHENA IN THE HEART. 105 

with virtue of character, in so many partial ways, that the 
impression left on the reader's mind — if, indeed, it was 
ever impressed at all— has been confused and uncertain. 
In beginning the series of my corrected works, I wish this 
principle (in my own mind the foundation of every other) 
to be made plain, if nothing else is : and will try, there- 
fore, to make it so, as far as, by any effort, I can put it 
into unmistakeable words. And, first, here is a very 
simple statement of it, given lately in a lecture on the 
Architecture of the Y alley of the Somme, which will be 
better read in this place than in its incidental connection 
with my account of the porches of Abbeville. 

102. I had used, in a preceding part of the lecture, the 
expression, " by what faults " this Gothic architecture 
fell. We continually speak thus of works of art. We 
talk of their faults and merits, as of virtues and vices. 
What do we mean by talking of the faults of a picture, 
or the merits of a piece of stone ? 

The faults of a work of art are the faults of its work- 
man, and its virtues his virtues. 

Great art is the expression of the mind of a great man, 
and mean art, that of the want of mind of a weak man. 
A foolish person builds foolishly, and a wise one, sensibly ; 
a virtuous one, beautifully ; and a vicious one, basely. If 
stone work is well put together, it means that a thought- 
ful man planned it, and a careful man cut it, and an 
honest man cemented it. If it has too much ornament, 
it means that its carver was too greedy of pleasure ; if too 
5* 



106 l HE QUEEN OF 1 1 1 1: All:. 

little, that he was rude, or insensitive, or stupid, and the 
like. So that when once you have learned how to spell 

most precious of all legends, — pictures and build- 
ings, -you mar read the characters of men, and of na- 
tions, in their art, as in a mirror ; — nay, a- in a micro- 
scope, and magnified a hundredfold ; for the character 
becomes passionate in the art, and intensifies itself in all 
its noblest or meanest delights. Nay, not only as in a 
microscope, but as under a scalpel, and in dissection ; for 
a man may hide himself from you, or misrepresent him- 
self to you, every other way ; but he cannot in his work : 
there, be sure, you have him to the inmost. All that he 
likes, all that he sees, — all that he can do, — his imagina- 
tion, his affections, his perseverance, his impatience, his 
clumsiness, cleverness, everything is there. If the work is 
a cobweb, you know it was made by a spider ; if a honey- 
comb, by a bee ; a worm-cast is thrown up by a worm, 
and a nest wreathed by a bird ; and a house built by a 
man, worthily, if he is worthy, and ignobly, if he is ignoble. 

And always, from the least to the greatest, as the made 
thing is good or bad, so is the maker of it. 

103. You all use this faculty of judgment more or le><, 
whether you theoretically admit the principle or not. 
Take that floral gable ; * you don't suppose the man who 
built Stonehenge could have built that, or that the man 

* The elaborate pediment above the central porch at the west end 
of Rouen Cathedral, pierced into a transparent web of tracery, and 
enriched with a border of ; ' twisted eglantine." 



ATHENA IN THE HEART. 107 

who built that, would have built Stonehenge ? Do you 
think an old Roman would have liked such a piece of 
filigree work ? or that Michael Angelo would have spent 
his time in twisting these stems of roses in and out? Or, of 
modern handicraftsmen, do you think a burglar, or a brute, 
or a pickpocket could have carved it ? Could Bill Sykes 
have done it? or the Dodger, dexterous with finger and 
tool ? You will find in the end, that no man could have 
done it hut exactly the man who did it / and by looking 
close at it, you may, if you know your letters, read pre- 
cisely the manner of man he was. 

104. ISTow I must insist on this matter, for a grave 
reason. Of all facts concerning art, this is the one most 
necessary to be known, that, while manufacture is the 
work of hands only, art is the work of the whole spirit of 
man ; and as that spirit is, so is the deed of it : and by 
whatever power of vice or virtue any art is produced, the 
same vice or virtue it reproduces and teaches. That 
which is born of evil begets evil ; and that which is born 
of valour and honour, teaches valour and honour. All 
art is either infection or education. It must be one or 
other of these. 

105. This, I repeat, of all truths respecting art, is the 
one of which understanding is the most precious, and 
denial the most deadly. And I assert it the more, be- 
cause it has of late been repeatedly, expressly, and with 
contumely, denied ; and that by high authority : and I 
hold it one of the most sorrowful facts connected with the 



108 i ii r QT 1:1 \ OF THE All:. 

decline of the arts among as, that English gentlemen, of 
high standing as scholars.and artists, should have been 
blinded into the acceptance, and betrayed into the asser- 
tion of a fallacy which only authority such as theirs could 
have rendered for an instant credible. For the contrary 
of it is written in the history of all great nations; it is the 
one sentence always inscribed on the steps of their 
throned ; the one concordant voice in whieh they speak to 
us out of their dust. 

All such nations first manifest themselves as a pure and 
beautiful animal race, with intense energy and imagi- 
nation. They live lives of hardship by choice, and by 
grand instinct of manly discipline : they become fierce and 
irresistible soldiers ; the nation is always its own army, 
and their king, or chief head of government, is always, 
their first soldier. Pharaoh, or David, or Leonidas, or 
Valerius, or Barbarossa, or Coeur de Lion, or St. Louis, or 
Dandolo, or Frederick the Great : — Egyptian, Jew, Greek, 
Roman, German, English, French, Venetian, — that is in- 
violable law for them all ; their king must be their first 
soldier, or they cannot be in progressive power. Then, 
after their great military period, comes the domestic 
period ; in which, without betraying the discipline of war, 
they add to their great soldiership the delights and posses- 
sions of a delicate and tender home-life: and then, for all 
nations, is the time of their perfect art, which is the fruit, 
the evidence, the reward of their national ideal of charac- 
ter, developed by the finished care of the occupations of 



ATHENA IN THE HEAKT. 109 

peace. That is the history of all true art that ever was, 
or can be : palpably the history of it, — unmistakeably, — 
written on the forehead of it in letters of light,— in 
tongues of fire, by which the seal of virtue is branded as 
deep as ever iron burnt into a convict's flesh the seal of 
crime. But always, hitherto, after the great period, has 
followed the day of luxury, and pursuit of the arts for 
pleasure only. And all has so ended. 

106. Thus far of Abbeville building. Now I have 
here asserted two things, — first, the foundation of art in 
moral character; next, the foundation of moral character 
in war. I must make both these assertions clearer, and 
prove them. 

First, of the foundation of art in moral character. Of 
course art-gift and amiabilit} 7 of disposition are two dif- 
ferent things ; a good man is not necessarily a painter, 
nor does an eye for colour necessarily imply an honest 
mind. But great art implies the union of both powers : 
it is the expression, by an art-gift, of a pure soul. If the 
gift is not there, we can have no art at all ; and if the 
soul— and a right soul too — is not there, the art is bad, 
however dexterous. 

107. But also, remember, that the art-gift itself is only 
the result of the moral character of generations. A bad 
woman may have a sweet voice; but that sweetness of 
voice comes of the past morality of her race. That she 
can sing with it at all, she owes to the determination 
of laws of music by the morality of the past. Every 



110 THE QUEEN OF THE All:. 

act, every impulse, of virtue and vice, affects in any 
creature, face, voice, nervous power, and vigour and 
harmony of invention, at once. Pereeverance in right- 
ness of human conduct, renders, after a certain number 
of generations, human art possible; every sin clouds it, 
be it ever so little a one; and persistent vicious living 
and following of pleasure render, after a certain number 
of generations, all art impossible. Men are deceived by 
the long-suffering of the laws of nature; and mistake, in 
a nation, the reward of the virtue of its sires for the issue 
of its own sins. The time of their visitation will come, 
and that inevitably; for, it is always true, that if the 
fathers have eaten sour grapes, the children's teeth are 
set on edge. And for the individual, as soon as you have 
learned to read, you may, as I said, know him to the 
heart's core, through his art. Let his art-gift be never so 
great, and cultivated to the height by the schools of a 
great race of men ; and it is still but a tapestry thrown 
over his own being and inner soul ; and the bearing of it 
will show, infallibly, whether it hangs on a man, or on 
a skeleton. If you are dim-eyed, you may not see the 
difference in the fall of the folds at first, but learn how to 
look, and the folds themselves will become transparent, 
and you shall see through them the death's shape, or 
the divine one, making the tissue above it as a cloud of 
light, or as a winding-sheet. 

108. Then farther, observe, I have said (and you will 
find it true, and that to the uttermost) that, as all lovely 



ATHENA IN THE HEAET. Ill 

art is rooted in virtue, so it bears fruit of virtue, and 
is didactic in its own nature. It is often didactic 
also in actually expressed thought, as Giotto's, Michael 
Angelo's, Durer's, and hundreds more; but that is 
not its special function, — it is didactic chiefly by being- 
beautiful ; but beautiful with haunting thought, no less 
than with form, and full of myths that can be read only 
with the heart. 

For instance, at this moment there is open beside me 
as I write, a page of Persian manuscript, wrought with 
wreathed azure and gold, and soft green, and violet, 
and ruby and scarlet, into one field of pure resplendence. 
It is wrought to delight the eyes only ; and dt>es delight 
them ; and the man who did it assuredly had eyes in his 
head ; but not much more. It is not didactic art, but its 
author was happy : and it will do the good, and the harm, 
that mere pleasure can do. But, opposite me, is an early 
Turner drawing of the lake of Geneva, taken about tw x o 
miles from Geneva, on the Lausanne road, with Mont 
Blanc in the distance. The old city is seen lying beyond 
the waveless waters, veiled with a sweet misty veil of 
Athena's weaving : a faint light of morning, peaceful 
exceedingly, and almost colourless, shed from behind the 
Yoirons, increases into soft amber along the slope of the 
Saleve, and is just seen, and no more, on the fair warm 
fields of its summit, between the folds of a white cloud 
that rests upon the grass, but rises, high and tower-like, 
into the zenith of dawn above, 



112 'i in: Ql 1:1 \ OF THE aii:. 

109. There is not as much colour in that low amber 
light upon the hill-side as there is in the palest dead Leaf. 

The lake is not blue, but gray in mist, passing into deep 
shadow beneath the Yoirons' pines ; a few dark clusters 
of leaves, a single white flower — searcely seen — are all the 
gladness given to the rocks ot the shore. One of the ruby 
spots of the eastern manuscript would give colour enough 
for all the red that is in Turner's entire drawing. .For the 
mere pleasure of the eve, there is not so much in all those 
lines of his, throughout the entire landscape, as in half an 
inch square of the Persian's page. "What made him take 
pleasure in the low colour that is only like the brown of a 
dead leaf? in the cold gray of dawn — in the one white 
flower among the rocks— in these— and no more than these? 

110. He took pleasure in them because he had been 
bred among English fields and hills ; because the gentle- 
ness of a great race was in his heart, and its powers of 
thought in his brain ; because he knew the stories of the 
Alps, and of the cities at their feet ; because he had read 
the Homeric legends of the clouds, and beheld the gods of 
dawn, and the givers of dew to the fields ; because he 
knew the faces of the crags, and the imagery of the pas- 
sionate mountains, as a man knows the face of his friend ; 
because he had in him the wonder and sorrow concerning 
life and death, which are the inheritance of the Gothic 
soul from the days of its first sea kings ; and also the com- 
passion and the joy that are woven into the innermost 
fabric of every great imaginative spirit, born now in 



ATHENA IN THE HEART. 113 

countries that have lived by the Christian faith with any 
courage or truth. And the picture contains also, for us, 
just this which its maker had in him. to give ; and can 
convey it to us, just so far as we are of the temper in 
which it must be received. It is didactic if we are worthy 
to be taught, no otherwise. The pure heart, it will make 
more pure; the thoughtful, more thoughtful. It has in it 
no words for the reckless or the base. 

111. As I myself look at it, there is no fault nor folly of 
my life, — and both have been many and great, — that does 
not rise np against me, and take away my joy, and shorten 
my power of possession, of sight, of understanding. And 
every past effort of my life, every gleam of rightness or 
good in it, is with me now, to help me in my grasp of this 
art, and its vision. So far as I can rejoice in, or interpret 
either, my power is owing to what of right there is in me. 
I dare to say it, that, because through all my life I have 
desired good, and not evil ; because I have been kind to 
many; have wished to be kind to all ; have wilfully injur- 
ed none ; and because I have loved much, and not selfishly ; 
— therefore, the morning light is yet visible to me on those 
hills, and you/who read, may trust my thought and word 
in such work as I have to do for you ; and you will be glad 
afterwards that you have trusted them. 

112. Yet remember, — I repeat it again and yet again, — 
that I may for once, if possible, make this thing assuredly 
clear :— the inherited art-gift must be there, as well as the 
life in some poor measure, or rescued fragment, right. 



1 14 THE QUE] N OF THE AIR. 

This art-gift of mine could nol have been won by any work, 
or by any conduct : it belongs to me by birthright, and 
came by Athena's will, from the air of English country 
villages, and Scottish hills. I will risk whatever charge 
of folly may come on me, for printing one of niv many 
childish rhymes, written on a frosty day in Glen Farg,jus1 
north of Loch Leven. It bears date 1st January, 1S2S. 
I was born on the Sth of February, 1S19; and all that I 
ever could be, and all that I cannot be, the weak little 
rhyme already shows. 

(: Papa, how pretty those icicles are, 
That are seen so near, — that are seen so far ; 
— Those dropping waters that come from the rocks 
And many a hole, like the haunt of a fox. 
That silvery stream that runs babbling along. 
Making a murmuring, dancing song. 
Those trees that stand waving upon the rock's side, 
And men, that, like spectres, among them glide. 
And waterfalls that are heard from far, 
And come in sight when very near. 
And the water-wheel that turns slowly round, 
Grinding the corn that — requires to be ground, — 

(Political Economy of the future !) 

A.nd mountains at a distance seen, 

And rivers winding through the plain. 
And quarries with their craggy stones, 
And the wind among them moans." 

So foretelling Stones of Venice, and this essay on Athena. 
Enough now concerning myself. 



ATHENA EST THE HEAKT. 115 

113. Of Turner's life, and of its good and evil, both greaj;, 
but the good immeasurably the greater, his work is in all 
things a perfect and transparent evidence. His biography 
is simply, — " He did this, nor will ever another do its like 
again." Yet read what I have said of him, as compared 
with the great Italians, in the passages taken from the 
" Cestus of Aglaia," farther on, § 158, p. 162. 

114. This then is the nature of the connection of morals 
with art. ISTow, secondly, I have asserted the foundation 
of both these, at least, hitherto, in war. The reason of 
this too manifest fact is, that, until now, it has been im- 
possible for any nation, except a warrior one, to fix its 
mind wholly on its men, instead of on their possessions. 
Every great soldier nation thinks, necessarily, first of mul- 
tiplying its bodies and souls of men, in good temper and 
strict discipline. As long as this is its political aim, it 
does not matter what it temporarily suffers, or loses, either 
in numbers or in wealth ; its morality and its arts, (if it 
have national art-gift,) advance together ; but so soon as it 
ceases to be a warrior nation, it thinks of its possessions 
instead of its men ; and then the moral and poetic powers 
vanish together. 

115. It is thus, however, absolutely necessary to the vir- 
tue of war that it should be waged by personal strength, 
not by money or machinery. A nation that fights with a 
mercenary force, or with torpedos instead of its own arms, 
is dying. Not but that there is more true courage in mod- 
ern than even in ancient war ; but this is, first, because all 



1 10 THE QUEEN OF THE AIR. 

tjie remaining life of European nations is with a morbid 
intensity thrown into their soldiers ; and, secondly, because 
Iheir present heroism is the culmination of centuries of 
inbred and traditional valour, which Athena taught them 
by forcing them to govern the foam of the sea- wave and 
of the horse, — not the steam of kettles. 

116.. And farther, note this, which is vital to us in the 
present crisis : If war is to be made by money and machine- 
ry, the nation which is the largest and most covetous multi- 
tude will win. You may be as scientific as you choose ; 
the mob that can pay more for sulphuric acid and gun- 
powder will at last poison its bullets, throw acid in your. 
faces, and make an end of you ; — of itself, also, in good 
time, but of you first. And to the English people the 
choice of its fate is very near now. It may spasmodically 
defend its property with iron walls a fathom thick, a few 
years longer — a very few. No walls will defend either it, 
or its havings, against the multitude that is breeding and 
spreading, faster than the clouds, over the habitable earth. 
We shall be allowed to live by small pedlar's business, and 
ironmongery — since we have chosen those for our line of 
life — as long as we are found useful black servants to the 
Americans ; and are content to dig coals and sit in the cin- 
ders ; and have still coals to dig, — they once exhausted, or 
got cheaper elsewhere, we shall be abolished. But if we 
think more wisely, while there is yet time, and set our 
minds again on multiplying Englishmen, and not on 
cheapening English wares; if we resolve to submit to 



ATHENA IN THE HEART. 117 

wholesome laws of labour and economy, and, setting our 
political squabbles aside, try how many strong creatures, 
friendly and faithful to each other, we can crowd into every 
spot of English dominion, neither poison nor iron will pre- 
vail against us ; nor traffic — nor hatred : the noble nation 
will yet by the grace of Heaven, rule over the ignoble, and 
force of heart hold its own against fire-balls. 

117. But there is yet a farther reason for the depend- 
ence of the arts on war. The vice and injustice of the 
world are constantly springing anew, and are only to be 
subdued by battle ; the keepers of order and law must al- 
ways be soldiers. And now, going back to the myth of 
Athena, we see that though she is first a warrior maid, she 
detests war for its own sake ; she arms Achilles and 
Ulysses in just quarrels, but she disarms Ares. She con- 
tends, herself, continually against disorder and convulsion, 
in the Earth giants ; she stands by Hercules' side in vic- 
tory over all monstrous evil : iu justice only she judges 
and makes war. But in this war of hers she is wholly 
implacable. She has little notion of converting criminals. 
There is no faculty of mercy in her when she has been 
resisted. Her word is only, " I will mock when your fear 
cometh." Note the words that follow : " when your fear 
cometh as desolation, and your destruction as a whirl- 
wind;" for her wrath is of irresistible tempest: once 
roused, it is blind and deaf, — rabies — madness of anger — 
darkness of the Dies Iras. 

And that is, indeed, the sorrowfullest fact we have to 



115 THE QUEEM OF Till, All;. 

knowabouf our own several lives. Wisdom never for- 
goes. Whatever resistance we have offered to her law, 

she avenges for ever;— the lost hour can never be re- 
deemed, and the accomplished wrong never atoned for. 
The best that can be done afterwards, but for that, had 
been better;— the falsest of all the cries of peace, where 
there is no peace, is that of the pardon of sin, as the mob 
expect it. A\ r isdom can " put away" sin, but she cannot 
pardon it; and she is apt, in her haste, to put away the 
sinner as well, when the black aegis is on her breast. 

US. And this is also a fact we have to know about our 
national life, that it is ended as soon as it has lost the 
power of noble Anger. When it paints over, and apolo- 
gizes for its pitiful criminalities; and endures its false 
weights, and its adulterated food ;— dares not to decide 
practically between good and evil, and can neither honour 
the one, nor smite the other, but sneers at the good, as if 
it were hidden evil, and consoles the evil with pious 
sympathy, and conserves it in the sugar of its leaden 
heart, — the end is come. 

119. The first sign, then, of Athena's presence with any 
people, is that they become warriors, and that the chief 
thought of every man of them is to stand rightly in his 
rank, and not fail from his brother's side in battle." 
Wealth, and pleasure, and even love, are all, under 
Athena's orders, sacrificed to this duty of standing fast in 
the rank of war. 

But farther: Athena presides over industry, as well as 



ATHENA IN THE HEART. 119 

battle; typically, over women's industry; that brings 
comfort with pleasantness. Her word to us all is : — "Be 
well exercised, and rightly clothed. Clothed, and in your 
right minds ; not insane and in rags, nor in soiled fine 
clothes clutched from each other's shoulders. Fight and 
weave. Then I myself will answer for the course of the 
lance, and the colours of the loom." 

And now I will ask the reader to look with some care 
through these following passages respecting modern mul- 
titudes and their occupations, written long ago, but left 
in fragmentary form, in which they must now stay, and 
be of what use they can. 

120. It is not political economy to put a number of 
strong men down on an acre of ground, with no lodging, 
and nothing to eat. Nor is it political economy to build 
a city on good ground, and fill it with store of corn and 
treasure, and put a score of lepers to live in it. Political 
economy creates together the means of life, and the living 
persons who are to use them; and of both, the best and 
the most that it can, but imperatively the best, not the 
most. A few good and healthy men, rather than a mul- 
titude of diseased rogues ; and a little real milk and wine 
rather than much chalk and petroleum ; but the gist of 
the whole business is that the men and their property 
must both be produced together — not one to the loss of 
the other. Property must not be created in lands deso- 
late by exile of their people, nor multiplied and depraved 
humanity, in lands barren of bread. 



!-0 THE QUEEH 01 THE All:. 

121. Nevertheless, though the men and their posses- 
sions are to be increase.] at the same time, the firet object 
of thought is always to be the multiplication of a worthy 
people. The strength of the nation is in its multitude, 
not in its territory; but only in its sound multitude. It 
is one thing, both in a man and a nation, to gain flesh, 
and another to be swollen with putrid humours. Not 
that multitude ever ought to be inconsistent with virtue. 
Two men should be wiser than one, and two thousand than 
two ; nor do I know another so gross fallacy in the records 
of human stupidity as that excuse for neglect of crime by 
greatness of cities. As if the first purpose of congregation 
were not to devise laws and repress crimes ! as if bees and 
wasps could live honestly in flocks,— men, only in separate 
dens !— as if it was easy to help one another on the oppo- 
site sides of a mountain, and impossible on the opposite 
sides of a street ! But when the men are true and good, 
and stand shoulder to shoulder, the strength of any nation 
is in its quantity of life, not in its land nor gold. The 
more good men a state has, in proportion to its territory, 
the stronger the state. And as it has been the madness 
of economists to seek for gold instead of life, so it has been 
the madness of kings to seek for land instead of life. 
They want the town on the other side of the river, and 
seek it at the spear point: it never enters their stupid 
heads that to double the honest souls in the town on t/tis 
side of the river, would make them stronger kings; and 
that this doubling might be done by the ploughshare in- 






ATHENA IN THE HEART. 121 

stead of the spear, and through happiness instead of misery. 

Therefore, in brief, this is the object of all true policy 
and true economy : " utmost multitude of good men on 
every given space of ground" — imperatively always, 
good, sound, honest men, not a mob of white-faced 
thieves. So that, on the one. hand, all aristocracy is 
wrong which is inconsistent with numbers ; and, on the 
other, all numbers are wrong which are inconsistent with 
breeding. 

122. Then, touching the accumulation of wealth for the 
maintenance of such men, observe, that you must never 
use the terms "money" and "wealth" as synonymous. 
Wealth consists of the good, and therefore useful, things 
in the possession of the nation : money is only the written 
or coined sign of the relative quantities of wealth in each 
person's possession. All money is a divisible title-deed, 
of immense importance as an expression of right to pro- 
perty ; but absolutely valueless, as property itself. Thus, 
supposing a nation isolated from all others, the money in 
its possession is, at its maximum value, worth all the pro- 
perty of the nation, and no more, because no more can be 
got for it. And the money of all nations is worth, at its 
maximum, the property of all nations, and no more, for no 
more can be got for it. Thus, every article of property 
produced increases, by its value, the value of all the money 
in the world, and every article of property destroyed, 
diminishes the value of all the money in the world. If 
ten men are cast away on a rock, with a thousand pounds 



L22 I HE QUEEN OF "i in; AIU. 

in their pockets, and there is on the rock neither food nor 
shelter, their money is worth simply nothing; for nothing 
'is to be had for it : if they build ten huts, and recover a 
cask of biscuit from the wreck, then their thousand pounds, 
at its maximum value, is worth ten huts and a cask of 
biscuit. If they make their thousand pounds into two 
thousand by writing new notes, their two thousand pounds 
are still only worth ten huts and a cask of biscuit. And 
the law of relative value is the same for all the world, and 
all the people in it, and all their property, as for ten men 
on a rock. Therefore, money is truly and finally lost in 
the degree in which its value is taken from it, (ceasing in 
that degree to be money at all) ; and it is truly gained in 
the degree in which value is added to it. Thus, suppose 
the money coined by the nation to be a fixed sum, divided 
very minutely, (say into francs and cents), and neither to 
be added to, nor diminished. Then every grain of food 
and inch of lodging added to its possessions makes every 
cent in its pockets worth proportionally more, and every 
grain of food it consumes, and inch of roof it allows to fall 
to ruin, makes every cent in its pockets worth less ; and 
this with mathematical precision. The immediate value 
of the money at particular times and places depends, in- 
deed, on the humours of the possessors of property ; but 
the nation is in the one case gradually getting richer ; and 
will feel the pressure of poverty steadily everywhere 
relaxing, whatever the humours of individuals may be; 
and, in the other case, is gradually growing poorer, and 



ATHENA IN THE HEAKT. 123 

the pressure of its poverty will every day tell more and 
more, in ways that it cannot explain, but will most 
bitterly feel. 

123. The actual quantity of money which it coins, in 
relation to its real property, is therefore only of conse- 
quence for convenience of exchange ; but the proportion 
in which this quantity of money is divided among indi- 
viduals expresses their various rights to greater or less 
proportions of the national property, and must not, there- 
fore, be tampered with. The Government may at any 
time, with perfect justice, double its issue of coinage, if it 
gives every man who had ten pounds in his pocket, an- 
other ten pounds, and every man who had ten pence, an- 
other ten pence ; for it thus does not make any of them 
richer ; it merely divides their counters for them into twice 
the number. But if it gives the newly-issued coins to 
other people, or keeps them itself, it simply robs the 
former holders to precisely that extent. This most im- 
portant function of money, as a title-deed, on the non- 
violation of which all national soundness of commerce 
and peace of life depend, has been never rightly distin- 
guished by economists from the quite unimportant func- 
tion of money as a means of exchange. You can exchange 
goods, — at some inconvenience, indeed, but still you can 
contrive to do it, — without money at all ; but you cannot 
maintain your claim to the savings of your past life with- 
out a document declaring the amount of them, which the 
nation and its Government will respect. 



L2 1 l ill. QUE] \ OF i hi. ah:. 

L24. And as econ ists have lost sigh! of ibis great 

function of money in relation to individual rights, so 
they have equally lost sight of its function as a represen- 
tative of good things. That, for every g 1 thing pro- 
duced, so much money is put into everybody's pocket — 
is the one simple and primal truth for the public to know, 
and for economists to teach. How many of them have 
taught it? Some have; but only incidentally; and 
others will say it is a truism. If it be, do the public 
know it? Does your ordinary English householder know- 
that every costly dinner he gives lias destroyed for ever" 
as much money as it is worth? Does every well-edu- 
cated girl — do even the women in high political posi- 
tion — know that every fine dress they wear themselves, 
or cause to be worn, destroys precisely so much of the 
national money as the labour and material of it are worth ? 
If this be a truism, it is one that needs proclaiming some- 
what louder. 

125. That, then, is the relation of money and good-. 
So much goods, so much money; so little goods, so little 
money. But, as there is this true relation between 
money and "goods," or good things, so there is a false 
relation between money and "bads," or bad things. 
.Many bad things will fetch a price in exchange; bu1 
they do not increase the wealth of the country. Good 
wine is wealth — drugged wine is not; good meat is 
wealth — putrid meat is not; good pictures are wealth — 
bad pictures are not. A thing is worth precisely what 



ATHENA EST THE HEART. 125 

it can do for you; not what you choose to pay for it. 
Tou may pay a thousand pounds for a cracked pipkin, 
if you please ; but you do not by that transaction make 
the cracked pipkin worth one that will hold water, nor 
that, nor any pipkin whatsoever, worth more than it was 
before you paid such sum for it. Tou may, perhaps, 
induce many potters to manufacture fissured pots, and 
many amateurs of clay to buy them ; but the nation is, 
through the whole business so encouraged, rich by the 
addition to its wealth of so many potsherds — and there 
an end. The thing is worth what it can do for you, not 
what you think it can; and most national luxuries, now- 
a-days, are a form of potsherd, provided for the solace of 
a self-complacent Job, voluntary sedent on his ash-heap. 

126. And, also, so far as good things already exist, and 
have become media of exchange, the variations in their 
prices are absolutely indifferent to the nation. Whether 
Mr. A. buys a Titian from Mr. B. for twenty, or for two thou- 
sand, pounds, matters not sixpence to the national reve- 
nue : that is to say, it matters in nowise to the revenue 
whether Mr. A. has the picture, and Mr. B. the money, 
or Mr. B. the picture, and Mr. A. the money. Which of 
them will spend the money most wisely, and which of 
them will keep the picture most carefully, is, indeed, a 
matter of some importance ; but this cannot be known by 
the mere fact of exchange. 

127. The wealth of a nation then, first, and its peace 
and well-being besides, depend on the number of person? 



12G THE Ql I : A1U. 

it can employ in making good and useful things. I say 
it> well-being also, for the character of men depends 
more on their occupations than on any teaching we can 

give them, or principles with which Ave can imbiie them. 
The employment forms the habits of body and mind, and 
these are the constitution of the man; — the greater part 
of his moral or persistent nature, whatever effort, under 
special excitement, he may make to change, or overcome 
them. Employment is the half, and the primal half, of 
education — it is the warp of it ; and the fineness or the 
endurance of all subsequently woven pattern depends 
wholly on its straightness and strength. And, whatever 
difficulty there may be in tracing through past history 
the remoter connections of event and cause, one chain 
of sequence is always clear: the formation, namely, of 
the character of nations by their employments, and the 
determination of their final fate by their character. The 
moment, and the first direction of decisive revolutions, 
often depend on accident; but their persistent course, and 
their consequences, depend wholly on the nature of the 
people. The passing of the Reform Bill by the late 
English Parliament may have been more or less acci- 
dental: the results of the measure now rest on the cha- 
racter of the English people, as it has been developed 
by their recent interests, occupations, and habits of life. 
Whether, as a body, they employ their new powers for 
good or evil, will depend, not on their facilities of knowl- 
edge, nor even on the general intelligence they may pos- 



ATHENA EST THE HEART. 127 

sess ; but on the number of persons among them whom 
wholesome employments have rendered familiar with 
the duties, and modest in their estimate of the promises, 
of Life. 

128. But especially in framing laws respecting the 
treatment or employment of improvident and more or 
less vicious persons, it is to be remembered that as men 
are not made heroes by the performance of an act of 
heroism, but must be brave before they can perform it, so 
they are not made villains by the commission of a crime, 
but were villains before they committed it ; and that the 
right of public interference with their conduct begins 
when they begin to corrupt themselves ; — not merely at 
the moment when they have proved themselves hope- 
lessly corrupt. 

All measures of reformation are effective in exact 
proportion to their timeliness : partial decay may be 
cut away and cleansed ; incipient error corrected : but 
there is a point at which corruption can no more be 
stayed, nor wandering recalled. It has been the manner 
of modern philanthropy to remain passive until that pre- 
cise period, and to leave the sick to perish, and the fool- 
ish to stray, while it spent itself in frantic exertions to 
raise the dead, and reform the dust. 

The recent direction of a great weight of public opin- 
ion against capital punishment is, I trust, the sign of an 
awakening perception that punishment is the last and 
worst instrument in the hands of the legislator for 



128 THE \'i l l N OF I in: AIR. . 

the prevention of crime. The true instruments of re 
formation are employment and reward; — not punish- 
ment. Aid the willing, honour the virtuous, and compel 
the idle into occupation, and there will be no need for 
the compelling of any into the great and last indolence of 
death. 

129. The beginning of all true reformation among the 
criminal classes depends on the establishment of institu- 
tions for their active employment, while their criminality 
is still unripe, and their feelings of self-respect, capacities 
of affection, and sense of justice, not altogether quenched. 
That those who are desirous of employment should always 
be able to find it, will hardly, at the present day, be dis- 
puted : but that those who are tmdesirous of employment 
should of all persons be the most strictly compelled to it, 
the public are hardly yet convinced ; and they must be 
convinced. If the danger of the principal thoroughfares 
in their capital city, and the multiplication of crimes 
more ghastly than ever yet disgraced a nominal civiliza- 
tion, are not enough, they will not have to wait long be- 
fore they receive sterner lessons. For our neglect of the 
lower orders has reached a point at which it begins to 
bear its necessary fruit, and every day makes the fields, 
not whiter, but more sable, to harvest. 

130. The general principles by which employment 
should be regulated may be briefly stated as follows: — 

1. There being three great classes of mechanical pow- 
ers at our disposal, namely, («) vital or muscular power; 



ATHENA EST THE HEAET. 129 

(b) natural mechanical power of wind, water, and electri- 
city ; and (c) artificially produced mechanical power ; it is 
the first principle of economy to use all available vital 
power first, then the inexpensive natural forces, and only 
at last to have recourse to artificial power. And this, 
because it is always better for a man to work with his 
own hands to feed and clothe himself, than to stand idle 
while a machine works for him ; and if he cannot by all 
the labour healthily possible to him, feed and clothe him- 
self, then it is better to use an inexpensive machine — as a 
windmill or watermill — than a costly one like a steam- 
engine, so long as we have natural force enough at our 
disposal. Whereas at present we continually hear econ- 
omists regret that the water-power of the cascades or 
streams of a country should be lost, but hardly ever that 
the muscular power of its idle inhabitants should be lost ; 
and, again, we see vast districts, as the south of Provence, 
where a strong wind* blows steadily all day long for six 
days out of seven throughout the year, without a wind- 
mill, while men -are continually employed a hundred 
miles to the north, in digging fuel to obtain artificial 
power. But the principal point of all to be kept in view 
is, that in every idle arm and shoulder throughout the 
country there is a certain quantity of force, equivalent to 
the force of so much fuel ; and that it is mere insane 

* In order fully to utilize this natural power, we only require 
machinery to turn the variable into a constant velocity — no insur- 
mountable difficulty. 

6* 



130 l HE Ql EEH OF THE AIR. 

waste to dig for coal for our force, while the vital force is 
unused : and not only unused, but, in being so, corrupt- 
ing and polluting itself. We waste our coal, and spoil 
our humanity at one and the same instant. Therefore, 
wherever there is an idle arm, always save coal with it, 
and the stores of England Avill last all the longer. And 
precisely the same argument answers the common one 
about " taking employment out of the hands of the indus- 
trious labourer." Why, what is " employment " hut the 
putting out of vital force instead of mechanical force \ 
We are continually in search of means of strength, — to 
pull,- to hammer, to fetch, to carry ; we waste our future 
resources to get this strength, while we leave all the liv- 
ing fuel to burn itself out in mere pestiferous breath, and 
production of its variously noisome forms of ashes ! 
Clearly, if we want fire for force, we want men for force 
first. The industrious hands must already have so much 
to do that they can do no more, or else we need not use 
machines to help them. Then use the idle hands first. 
Instead of dragging petroleum with a steam-engine, put 
it on a canal, and drag it with human arms and shoul- 
ders. Petroleum cannot possibly be in a hurry to arrive 
anywhere. We can always order that, and many other 
things, time enough before we want it. So, the carriage 
of everything which does not spoil by keeping may most 
wholesomely and safely be done by water-traction and 
sailing vessels; and no healthier work can men be put to, 
nor better discipline, than such active porterage. 



ATHENA IN THE HEART. 131 

131. (2nd.) In employing all the muscular power at our 
disposal we are to make the employments we choose as 
educational as possible. For a wholesome human employ- 
ment is the first and best method of education, mental as 
well as bodily. A man taught to plough, row, or steer 
well, and a woman taught to cook properly, and make a 
dress neatly, are already educated in many essential moral 
habits. Labour considered as a discipline has hitherto 
been thought of only for criminals; but the real and 
noblest function of labour is to prevent crime, and not 
to be Reformatory, but Formatory. 

132. The third great principle of employment is, that 
whenever there is pressure of poverty to be met, all 
enforced occupation should be directed to the production 
of useful articles only, that is to say, of food, of simple 
clothing, of lodging, or of the means of conveying, dis- 
tributing, and preserving these. It is yet little under- 
stood by economists, and not at all by the public, that 
the employment of persons in a useless business cannot 
relieve ultimate distress. The money given to employ 
riband-makers at Coventry is merely so much money 
withdrawn from what would have employed lace-mak- 
ers at Honiton : or makers of something else, as use- 
less, elsewhere. We must spend our money in some 
way, at some time, and it cannot at any time be spent 
without employing somebody. If we gamble it away, 
the person who wins it must spend it; if we lose it in 
a railroad speculation, it has gone into some one else's 



L32 i hi. Ql i EH OF i in: aii:. 

pockets, or merely gone to pay navvies for making ;i 
useless embankment, instead of to pay riband or button 
makers for making useless ribands or buttons; we cannot 
lose it (unless by actually destroying it) without giving 
employment of some kind; and therefore, whatever 
quantity of money exists, the relative quantity of em- 
ployment must some day come out of it; but the dis 
of the nation signifies- that the employments given have 
produced nothing that will support its existence. Men 
cannot live on ribands, or buttons, or velvet, or by going 
quickly from place to place; and every coin spent in 
useless ornament, or useless motion, is so much with- 
drawn from the national means of life. One of the most 
beautiful uses of railroads is to enable A to travel from 
the town of X to take away the business of B in the 
town of Y ; while, in the meantime, B travels from the 
town of Y to take away A's business in the town of X. 
But the national wealth is not increased by these opera- 
tions. Whereas every coin spent in cultivating ground, 
in repairing lodging, in making necessary and good roadSj 
in preventing danger by sea or land, and in carriage of 
food or fuel where they are required, is so much absolute 
and direct gain to the whole nation. To cultivate land 
round Coventry makes living easier at Iloniton, and every 
acre of sand gained from the sea in Lincolnshire, makes 
life easier all over England. 

4th, and lastly. Since for every idle person, some one 
else must be working somewhere to provide him with 



ATHENA EST THE HEAKT. 133 

clothes and food, and doing, therefore, double the quantity 
of work that would be enough for his own needs, it is only 
a matter of pure justice to compel the idle person to work 
for his maintenance himself. The conscription has been 
used in many countries, to take away labourers who sup- 
ported their families, from their useful work, and maintain 
them for purposes chiefly of military display at the public 
expense. Since this has been long endured by the most 
civilized nations, let it not be thought that they would 
not much more gladly endure a conscription which should 
seize only the vicious and idle, already living by criminal 
procedures at the public expense ; and which should dis- 
cipline and educate them to labour which would not only 
maintain themselves, but be serviceable to the common- 
wealth. The question is simply this :— we must feed the 
drunkard, vagabond, and thief; — but shall we do so by 
letting them steal their food, and do no work for it ? or 
shall we give them their food in appointed quantity, and 
enforce their doing work which shall be worth it ? and 
which, in process of time, will redeem their own char- 
acters, and make them happy and serviceable members of 
society ? 

I find by me a violent little fragment of undelivered 
lecture, which puts this, perhaps, still more clearly. Your 
idle people, (it says,) as they are now, are not merely 
waste coal-beds. They are explosive coal-beds, which you 
pay a high annual rent for. You are keeping all these 
idle persons, remember, at far greater cost than if they 






13 I THE QTTEEH OP THE AIR. 

were busy. Do you think a vicious person eats less than 
an honesl one? or that it is cheaper to keep a bad man 
drunk, than a good inaD sober? There is, I suppose, a 

dim idea in the mind of tin' public, that they don't pay 
for the maintenance of people they don't employ. Those 
staggering rascals at the street corner, grouped around its 
splendid angle of public-house, Ave fancy they are no 

servants of ours ? that we pay them no wages ? that no 
cash out of our pockets is spent over that beer-stain cm 1 
counter ! 

Whose cash is it then they are spending? It is nor 
got honestly by work. You know that much. Where 
do they get it from ? Who has paid for their dinner and 
their pot? Those fellows can only live in one of two 
ways — by pillage or beggary. Their annual income by 
thieving comes out of the public pocket, you will admit. 
They are not cheaply fed, so far as they are fed by theft. 
But the rest of their living — all that they don't steal — - 
they must beg. Not with success from you, you think. 
Wise as benevolent, you never gave a penny in ''indis- 
criminate charity." Well, I congratulate you on the 
freedom of your conscience from that sin, mine being 
bitterly burdened with the memory of many a sixpence 
given to beggars of whom I knew nothing, but that they 
had pale faces and thin waists. But it is not that kind of 
street beggary that the vagabonds of our people chiefly 
practise. It is home beggary that is the worst beggars' 
trade. Home alms which it is their worst degradation to 



ATHENA EST THE HEART. 135 

receive. Those. scamps know well enough that yon and 
your wisdom are worth nothing to them. They won't 
beg of yon. They will beg of their sisters, and mothers, 
and wives, and children, and of any one else who is 
enough ashamed of being of the same blood with them to 
pay to keep them ont of sight. Every one of those black- 
guards is the bane of a family. That is the deadly " in- 
discriminate charity " — the charity which each household 
pays to maintain its own private curse. 

133. And you think that is no affair of yours ? and that 
every family ought to watch over and subdue its own liv- 
ing plague? Pat it to yourselves this way, then : suppose 
you knew every one of those families kept an idol in an 
inner room — a big-bellied bronze figure, to which daily 
sacrifice and oblation was made ; at whose feet so much 
beer and brandy was poured out every morning on the 
ground : and before which, every night, good meat, enough 
for two men's keep, was set, and left, till it was putrid, 
and then carried out and thrown on the dunghill ; — you 
would put an end to that form of idolatry with your best 
diligence, I suppose. Ton would understand then that 
the beer, and brandy, and meat, were wasted ; and that 
the burden imposed by each household on itself lay heavily 
through them on the whole community ? But, suppose 
farther, that this idol were not of silent and quiet bronze 
only ; — but an ingenious mechanism, wound up every 
morning, to run itself clown in automatic blasphemies ; that 
it struck and tore with its hands the people who set food 



13G THE QUEEN OF THE AIR. 

before it; that it was anointed with poisonous nngnentSj 
and infected the air for miles round. You would interfere 
with the idolatry then, straightway I Will you not inter- 
fere with it now, when the infection that the venomous 
idol spreads is not merely death — but sin? 

134. So far the old lecture. Returning to cool English^ 
the end of the matter is, that sooner or later, we shall have 
to register our people; and to know how they live; and to 
make sure, if they are capable of work, that right work is 
given them to do. 

The different classes of work for which bodies of men 
could be consistently organized, might ultimately become 
numerous ; these following divisions of occupation may 
at once be suggested : — 

1. Road-making. — Good roads to be made, wherever 
needed, and kept in repair ; and the annual loss on unfre- 
quented roads, in spoiled horses, strained wheels, and time, 
done away with. 

2. Bringing in of waste land. — All waste lands not ne- 
cessary for public health, to be made accessible and grad- 
ually reclaimed ; chiefly our wide and waste seashores. 
Not our mountains nor moorland. Our life depends on 
them, more than on the best arable we have. 

3. Hdrbowr -making. — The deficiencies of safe or conve- 
nient harbourage in our smaller ports to be remedied ; oth- 
er harbours built at dangerous points of coast, and a dis- 
ciplined body of men always kept in connection with the 
pilot and life-boat services. There is room for every ordei 



ATHENA IN THE HEART. 137 

of intelligence in this work, and for a large body of supe- 
rior officers* 

4. Porterage. — All heavy goods, not requiring speed in 
transit, to be carried (under preventive duty on transit by 
railroad) by canal-boats, employing men for draught ; and 
the merchant-shipping service extended by sea; so that no 
ships may be wrecked for want of hands, while there are 
idle ones in mischief on shore. 

5. Repair of buildings. — A body of men in various 
trades to be kept at the disposal of the authorities in every 
large town, for repair of buildings, especially the houses 
of the poorer orders, who, if no such provision were made, 
could not employ workmen on their own houses, but would 
simply live with rent walls and roofs. 

6. Dressmaking. — Substantial dress, of standard mate- 
rial and kind, strong shoes, and stout bedding, to be man- 
ufactured for the poor, so as to render it unnecessary for 
them, unless by extremity of improvidence, to wear cast 
clothes, or be without sufficiency of clothing. 

1. Works of Art. — Schools to be established on 
thoroughly sound principles of manufacture, and use 
of materials, and with sample and, for given periods, un- 
alterable modes of work ; first, in pottery, and embracing 
gradually metal work, sculpture, and decorative paint- 
ing ; the two points insisted upon, in distinction from 
ordinary commercial establishments, being perfectness 
of material to the utmost attainable degree; and the 
production of everything by hand-work, for the special 



138 THE Ql li v -i THE All:. 

purpose of developing personal power ami skill in the 
workman. 

The two last departments, and some subordinate. branch- 
es of the others, would include the service of women and 
children. 

I give now, for such farther illustration as they contain 
of the points I desire most to insist upon with respect both 
to education and employment, a portion of the serio of 
notes published some time ago in the Art Journal, on the 
opposition of Modesty and Liberty, and the unescapable 
law of wise restraint. I am sorry that they are written 
obscurely; — and it may be thought affectedly: — but the 
fact is, I have always had three different ways of writ- 
ing; one, with the single view of making myself under- 
stood, in which I necessarily omit a great deal of what 
comes into my head : — another, in which I say what I think 
ought to be said, in what I suppose to be the best words I 
can find for it; (which is in reality an affected style — be it 
good or bad ;) and my third way of writing is to say all 
that comes into my head for my own pleasure, in the firsl 
words that come, retouching them afterwards into (approx- 
imate) grammar. These notes for the Art Journal were 
so written; and I like them myself, of course; but ask the 
reader's pardon for their confusedness. 

135. " Sir, it cannot be better done." 

We will insist, with the reader's permission, on thiscom- 
fortful saying of Albert Durer's, in order to find out, if we 
may. what Modesty is; which it will be well for painters, 



ATHENA IN THE HEAET. 139 

readers, and especially critics, to know, before going farther. 
What it is ; or, rather, who she is ; her fingers being among 
the deftest in laying the ground-threads of Aglaia's Ces- 
tus. 

For this same opinion of Albert's is entertained by many 
other people respecting their own doings — a very preva- 
lent opinion, indeed, I find it ; and the answer itself, though 
rarely made with the ISTuremberger's crushing decision, is 
nevertheless often enough intimated, with -delicacy, by ar- 
tists of all countries, in their various dialects. Neither can 
it always be held an entirely modest one, as it assuredly 
was in the man who would sometimes estimate a piece of 
his unconquerable work at only the worth of a plate of 
fruit, or a flask of wine — would have taken even one " fig 
for it," kindly offered ; or given it royally for nothing, to 
show his hand to a fellow-king of his own, or any other 
craft — as Gainsborough gave the " Boy at the Stile " for a 
solo on the violin. An entirely modest saying, I repeat, 
in him— not always in us. For Modesty is " the measur- 
ing virtue," the virtue of modes or limits. She is, indeed, 
said to be only the third or youngest of the children of the 
cardinal virtue, Temperance ; and apt to be despised, being 
more given to arithmetic, and other vulgar studies (Cinde- 
rella-like) than her elder sisters : but she is useful in the 
household, and arrives at great results with her yard-measure 
and slate-pencil — a pretty little March an de des Modes, 
cutting her dress always according to the silk (if this be the 
proper feminine reading of " coat according to the cloth"), 



140 i in' ,,i i i.\ OF THE All;. 

so that, consulting with her carefully of a morning, men 
gel to know not, only their income, bul their inbeing— to 
know the?)iselves, that is. in a gauger's manner, round, and 

up am] down — surface and contents; what is in them,and 
what may be got out of them; and, in line, their entire 
canon of weight and capacity. That yard-measure of 
.Modesty's, lent to those who will use it, is a curious music- 
al reed, and will go round and round waists that arc -len- 
der enough, with latent melody in every joint of it, the 
dark root only being soundless, moist from the wave 
wherein 

"Null' altra pianta che facesse fronda 
indurasse, puote aver vita." * 

But when the little sister herself takes it in hand, to mea- 
sure things outside of us with, the joints shoot out in an 
amazing manner: the four-square walls even of celestial 
cities being measurable enough by that reed ; and the way 
pointed to them, though only to be followed, or even seen, 
in the dim starlight shed down from worlds amidst which 
there is no name of Measure any more, though the reality 
of it always. For, indeed, to all true modesty the neces- 
sary business is not inlook, but outlook, and especially vj~>- 
look: it is only her sister, Shamefacedness, who is known 
by the drooping lashes — Modesty, quite otherwise, by her 
large eyes full of wonder; for she never contemns herself, 
nor is ashamed of herself, but forgets herself— at least un- 
til she has done something worth memory. It is easy to 

rurfjaturio, i. 103. 



ATHENA IN THE HEART. 141 

peep and potter about one's own deficiencies in a cpriet 
immodest discontent ; but Modesty is so pleased with 
other people's doings, that she has no leisure to lament 
her own : and thus, knowing the fresh feeling of content- 
ment, unstained with thought of self, she does not fear 
being pleased, when there is cause, with her own Tight- 
ness, as with another's, saying calmly, "Be it mine, or 
yours, or whose else's it may, it is no matter ; — this also is 
well." But the right to say such a thing depends on 
continual reverence, and manifold sense of failure. If you 
have known yourself to have failed, you may trust, when 
it comes, the strange consciousness of success ; if you have 
faithfully loved the noble work of others, you need not 
fear to speak with respect, of things duly done, of your 
own. 

136. But the principal good that comes of art's being 
followed in this reverent feeling, is vitally manifest in the 
associative conditions of it. Men who know their place, 
can take it and keep it, be it low or high, contentedly and 
firmly, neither yielding nor grasping ; and the harmony 
of hand and thought follows, rendering all great deeds of 
art possible — deeds in which the souls of men meet like 
the jewels in the windows of Aladdin's palace, the little 
gems, and the large all equally pure, needing no cement 
but the fitting of facets; while the associative work of 
immodest men is all jointless, and astir with wormy am- 
bition ; putridly dissolute, and for ever on the crawl : so 
that if it come together for a time, it can only be by me- 



142 i in. Ql i.i N 0] i in: aik. 

tamorphosis through flash of volcanic fire out of the vale 
of Siddim, vitrifying the clay of ir. and fastening the slime, 
only to end in wilder scattering ; according to the fate of 
those oldest, mightiest, immodestesl of builders, of whom 
ii is told in scorn, " They had brick for stone, and slime 
had they for mortar." 

137. The first function of Modesty, then, being this re- 
cognition of place, her second is the recognition ot' law, 
and delight in it, for the sake of law itself, whether her 
part be to assert it, or obey. For as it belongs to all im- 
modesty to defy or deny law, and assert privilege and 
licence, according to its own pleasure (it being therefore 
rightly called "msolent" that is, "custom-breaking," vio- 
lating some usual and appointed order to attain for itself 
greater forwardness or power), so it is the habit of all 
modesty to love the constancy and "solemnity ," or, liter- 
ally, " accustomedness," of law, seeking first what are the 
solemn, appointed, inviolable customs and general orders 
of nature, and of the Master of nature, touching the 
matter in hand; and striving to put itself, as habitually 
and inviolably, in compliance with them. Out of which 
habit, once established, arises what is rightly called 
"conscience," not "science" merely, but " with-science," 
a science " with us," such as only modest creatures can 
have — with or within them — and within all creation be- 
sides, every member of it, strong or weak, witnessing 
together, and joining in the happy consciousness that each 
one's work is good ; the bee also being profoundly of that 



ATHENA m THE HEART. 143 

opinion ; and the lark ; and the swallow, in that noisy, 
but modestly upside-down, Babel of hers, under the eaves, 
with its unvoleanic slime for mortar; and the two ants 
who are asking of each other at the turn of that little 
ant's-foot-worn path through the moss, " lor via e lor 
fortuna ; " and the builders also, who built yonder pile 
of cloud-marble in the west, and the gilder who gilded it, 
and is gone down behind it. 

138. But I think we shall better understand what we 
ought of the nature of Modesty, and of her opposite, by 
taking a simple instance of both, in the practice of that 
art of music which the wisest have agreed in thinking the 
first element of education ; only I must ask the reader's 
patience with me through a parenthesis. 

Among the foremost men whose power has had to 
assert itself, though with conquest, yet with countless 
loss, through peculiarly English disadvantages of circum- 
stance, are assuredly to be ranked together, both for 
honour and for mourning, Thomas Bewick and George 
Cruikshank. There is, however, less cause for regret 
in the instance of Bewick. We may understand that it 
was well for us once to see what an entirely powerful 
painter's genius, and an entirely keen and true man's 
temper, could achieve, together, unhelped, but also un- 
harmed, among the black banks and wolds of Tyne. But 
the genius of Cruikshank has been cast away in an utterly 
ghastly and lamentable manner : his superb line- work, 
worthy of any class of subject, and his powers of concept 



1J ^ Jl " nil. All;. 

,i '-" 1 and composition, of which I cannol venture to 

estimate the range in their degraded application, hav- 

'"- been condemned, by his fate, to be spenl either in 

rude jesting, or in vain war with conditions of dee too 

low alike for record or rebuke, among the dregs of the 

British populace. Yet perhaps I am wrong in regretting 

even this: it may be an appointed lesson for futurity, that 

the art of the best English etcher in the nineteenth 

century, spent on illustrations of the lives of burglars and 

drunkards, should one day be seen in museums beneath 

Greek-vases fretted with drawings of the wars of Troy, or 

side by side with Durer's "Knight and Death." 

139. Be that as it may, I am at present glad to be able 
to refer to one of these perpetuations, by his strong hand, 
of such human character as our faultless British constitu- 
tion occasionally produces, in out-of-the-way corners. It 
is among his illustrations of the Irish Rebellion, and repre- 
sents the pillage and destruction of a gentleman's house 
by the mob. They have made a heap in the drawing- 
room of the furniture and books, to set first fire to ; and 
are tearing up the floor for its more easily kindled planks: 
the less busily-disposed meanwhile hacking round in rage, 
with axes, and smashing what they can with butt-ends 
of guns. I do not care to follow with words the ghastly 
truth of the picture into its detail; but the most expres- 
sive incident of the whole, and the one immediately to my 
purpose, is this, that one fellow has sat himself at the 
piano, on which, hilling down fiercely with his clenched 



ATHEISTA IN THE HEAKT. 145 

fists, lie plays, grinning, such tune as may be so pro- 
ducible, to which melody two of his companions, flourish- 
ing knotted sticks, dance, after their manner, on the top 
of the instrument. 

140. I think we have in this conception as perfect an 
instance as we require of the lowest supposable phase 
of immodest or licentious art in music ; the " inner con- 
sciousness of good " being dim, even in the musician and 
his audience; and wholly unsympathized with, and un- 
acknowledged, by the Delphian, Yestal, and all other 
prophetic and cosmic powers. This represented scene 
came into my mind suddenly, one evening, a few weeks 
ago, in contrast with another which I was watching in its 
reality ; namely, a group of gentle school-girls, leaning 
over Mr. Charles Halle as he was playing a variation 
on "Home, sweet Home." The} 7 had sustained with 
unwonted courage the glance of subdued indignation with 
which, having just closed a rippling melody of Sebastian 
Bach's, (much like what one might fancy the singing 
of nightingales would be if they fed on honey instead 
of flies), he turned to the slight, popular air. But they 
had their own associations with it, and besought for, and 
obtained it; and pressed close, at first, in vain, to see 
what no glance could follow, the traversing of the fingers. 
They soon thought no more of seeing. The wet eyes, 
round-open, and the little scarlet upper lips, lifted, and 
drawn slightly together, in passionate glow of utter 
wonder, became picture-like, — porcelain-like, — in mo- 
7 



14G THE QUEEN OF THE AIR. 

tionless joy, as the sweet multitude of low notes fell 
in their timely infinities, like summer rain. Only La 
Robbia himself (nor even he, unless with tenderer use 
of colour than is usual in his work) could have rendered 
some image of that listening. 

141. But if the reader can give due vitality in his 
fancy to these two scenes, he will have in them represent- 
ative types, clear enough for all future purpose, of the 
several agencies of debased and perfect art. And the in- 
terval may easily and continuously be filled by mediate 
gradations. Between the entirely immodest, unmeas- 
ured, and (in evil sense) unmannered, execution with the 
fist ; and the entirely modest, measured, and (in the 
noblest sense) mannered, or moral'd, execution with the 
finger; between the impatient and unpractised cluing, 
containing in itself the witness of lasting impatience and 
idleness through all previous life, and the patient and 
practised doing, containing in itself the witness of self- 
restraint and unwearied toil through all previous life ; — 
between the expressed subject and sentiment of home vio- 
lation, and the expressed subject and sentiment of home 
love; — between the sympathy of audience, given in irrev- 
erent and contemptuous rage, joyless as the rabidness of 
a dog, and the sympathy of audience given in an almost 
appalled humility of intense, rapturous, and yet entirely 
reasouing and reasonable pleasure; — between these two 
limits of octave, the reader will find he can class, accord- 
ing to its modesty, usefulness, and grace, or becomingness 



ATHENA IN THE HEART. 147 

all other musical art. For although purity of purpose 
and fineness of execution by no means go together, 
degree to degree, (since fine, and indeed all but the finest, 
work is often spent in the most wanton purpose— as in all 
our modern opera — and the rudest execution is again 
often joined with purest purpose, as in a mother's song to 
her child), still the entire accomplishment of music is 
only in the union of both. For the difference between 
that "all but'' finest and "finest" is an infinite one; and 
besides this, however the power of the performer, once 
attained, may be afterwards misdirected, in slavery to 
popular passion or childishness, and spend itself, at its 
sweetest, in idle melodies, cold and ephemeral (like Mi- 
chael Angelo's snow statue in the other art), or else in 
vicious difficulty and miserable noise — crackling of thorns 
under the pot of public sensuality — still, the attainment 
of this power, and the maintenance of it, involve always 
in the executant some virtue or courage of high kind ; the 
understanding of which, and of the difference between 
the discipline which develops it and the disorderly efforts 
of the amateur, it will be one of our first businesses to 
estimate rightly. And though not indeed by degree to 
degree, yet in essential relation (as of winds to waves, the 
one being always the true cause of the other, though they 
are not necessarily of equal force at the same time), 
we shall find vice in its varieties, with art-failure, — ■ 
and virtue in its varieties, with art-success, — fall and rise 
together : the peasant-girl's song at her spinning-wheel, 



14$ I ill QUEEN OF I in: US. 

the peasant-labourer's "to the oaks and rills," 
tic music, feebly yet sensitively skilful,— music for 
the multitude, of beneficent, or of traitorous power, — 
dance-melodies, pure and orderly, or foul and frai I 
march-music, blatant in mere fever of animal pugna- 
city, or majestic with force of national duty and mem- 
ory, — song-music, reckless, sensual, sickly, slovenly 
getful even of the foolish words it effaces with foolish 
noise, — or thoughtful, sacred, healthful, artful, for ever 
sanctifying noble thought with separately distinguished 
loveliness of belonging sound, — all these families and 
gradations of good or evil, however mingled, follow, in so 
far as they are good, one constant law of virtue (or " life- 
strength," which is the literal meaning of the word, and 
its intended one, in wise men's mouths), and in so far as 
they are evil, are evil by outlawry and un virtue, or death- 
weakness. Then, passing wholly beyond the domain of 
death, we may still imagine the ascendant nobleness of 
the art, through all the concordant life of incorrupt crea- 
tures, and a continually deeper harmony of "jmissant 
words and murmurs made to bless," until we reach 

" The undisturbed song of pure consent, 
Aye sung before the sapphire-coloured throne." 

142. And so far as the sister arts can be conceived to 
have place or office, their virtues are subject to a law ab- 
solutely the same as that of music, only extending its 
authority into more various conditions, owing to the in- 
troduction* of a distinctly representative and historical 



ATHENA IN" THE HEART. 149 

• 

power, which acts under logical as well as mathematical 
restrictions, and is capable of endlessly changeful fault, fal- 
lacy, and defeat, as well as of endlessly manifold victory. 

143. Next to Modesty, and her delight in measures, let 
us reflect a little on the character of her adversary, the 
Goddess of Liberty, and her delight in absence of measures, 
or in false ones. It is true that there are liberties and 
liberties. Yonder torrent, crystal-clear, and arrow-swift, 
with its spray leaping into the air like white troops of 
fawns, is free enough. Lost, presently, amidst bankless, 
boundless marsh — soaking in slow shallowness, as it will, 

-hither and thither, listless, among the poisonous reeds and 
unresisting slime — it is free also. We may choose which 
liberty we like,— the restraint of voiceful rock, or the 
dumb and edgeless shore of darkened sand. Of that evil 
liberty, which men are now glorifying, and proclaiming 
as essence of gospel to all the earth, and will presently, I 
suppose, proclaim also to the stars, with invitation to them 
out of their courses, — and of its opposite continence, which 
is the clasp and zpvrw yrepivri of Aglaia's cestus, we must 
try to find out something true. For no quality of Art has 
been more powerful in its influence on public mind ; none 
is more frequently the subject of popular praise, or the 
end of vulgar effort, than what we call " Freedom." It 
is necessary to determine the justice or injustice of this 
popular praise. 

144. I said, a little while ago, that the practical teach- 
ing of the masters of Art was summed by the O of Giotto. 



- 1 '" 1 IHB Ql ii \ OF THE All:. 

" Vuu may judge my masteri 1 of craft," Giotto tells u S 

*' 1,v ^fog thai I can draw a circle unerringly." And 
we m; '. v ~ :lf, ' l . v believe him, understanding him to mean, 
that— though more may be necessary to an artist than' 
such a power— at least this power is necessary. The 
qualities of hand and eye needful to do this are the first 
conditions of artistic craft. 

145. Try to draw a circle yourself with the " free " 
hand, and with a single line. Yon cannot do it if your 
hand trembles, nor if it hesitates, nor if it is unmanageable, 
nor if it is in the common sense of the word "free." So 
far from being free, it must be under a control as absolute 
and accurate as if it were fastened to an inflexible bar of 
steel. And yet it must move, under this necessary con- 
trol, with perfect, un tormented serenity of ease. 

146. That is the condition of all good work whatso- 
ever. All freedom is error. Every line you lay down is 
either right or wrong : it may be timidly and awkwardly 
wrong, or fearlessly and impudently wrong : the aspect of 
the impudent wrongness is pleasurable to vulgar persons ; 
and is what they commonly call "free" execution: the' 
timid, tottering, hesitating wrongness is rarely so attract- 
ive ; yet sometimes, if accompanied with good qualities, 
and right aims in other directions, it becomes in a manner 
charming, like the inarticulateness of a child ; but, what- 
ever the charm or manner of the error, there is but 
one question ultimately to be asked respecting every line 
you draw, Is it right or wrong ? If r i g h tj it most assurcdIy 



ATHENA IN THE HEAKT. 151 

is not a " free " line, but an intensely continent, restrained, 
and considered line ; and the action of the hand in laying 
it is just as decisive, and just as " free " as the hand of a 
firstrate surgeon in a critical incision. A great operator 
told me that his hand could check itself within about the 
two-hundredth of an inch, in penetrating a membrane; 
and this, of course, without the help of sight, by sensation 
only. With help of sight, and in action on a substance 
which does not quiver nor yield, a fine artist's line is mea- 
surable in its proposed, direction to considerably less than 
the thousandth of an inch. 

A wide freedom, truly ! 

147. The conditions of popular art which most foster 
the common ideas about freedom, are merely results of 
irregularly energetic effort by men imperfectly educated ; 
these conditions being variously mingled with cruder 
mannerisms resulting from timidity, or actual imperfec- 
tion of body. Northern hands and eyes are, of course, 
never so subtle as Southern ; and in very cold countries, 
artistic execution is palsied. The effort to break through 
this timidity, or to refine the bluntness, may lead to a li- 
centious impetuosity, or an ostentatious minuteness. Every 
man's manner has this kind of relation to some defect in 
his physical powers or modes of thought ; so that in the 
greatest work there is no manner visible. It is at first 
uninteresting from its quietness; the majesty of restrained 
power only dawns gradually upon us, as we walk towards 
its horizon. 



L52 THE QUEEN OF THE AH*. 

There is, indeed, often great delightfnlness in tlie in- 
nocent manners of artists who have real power and hon- 
esty, and draw, in this way or that, as best they can, 
under such and such untoward circumstances of life. But 
the greater part of the looseness, flimsiness, or audacity 
of modern work is the expression of an inner spirit of 
licence in mind and heart, connected, as I said, with the 
peculiar folly of this age, its hope of, and trust in, "lib- 
erty." Of which we must reason a little in more general 
terms. 

148. I believe we can nowhere find a better type of a 
perfectly free creature than in the common house fly. 
]STor free only, but brave ; and irreverent to a degree 
which I think no human republican could by any phi- 
losophy exalt himself to. There is no courtesy in him ; 
he does not care whether it is king or clown whom he 
teases ; and in every step of his swift mechanical march, 
and in every pause of his resolute observation, there is one 
and the same expression of perfect egotism, perfect inde- 
pendence and self-confidence, and conviction of the world's 
having been made for flies. Strike at him with your 
hand ; and to him, the mechanical fact and external as- 
pect of the matter is, what to you it would be, if an acre 
of red clay, ten feet thick, tore itself up from the ground 
in one massive field, hovered over you in the air for a 
second, and came crashing down with an aim. That is 
the external aspect of it ; the inner aspect, to his fly's 
mind, is of a quite natural and unimportant occurrence — 



ATHENA IN THE HEART. 153 

one of the momentary conditions of his active life. He 
steps oiit of the way of your hand, and alights on the 
back of it. You cannot terrify him, nor govern him, nor 
persuade him, nor convince him. He has his own posi- 
tive opinion on all matters ; not an unwise one, usually, 
for his own ends ; and will ask no advice of yours. He 
has no work to do — no tyrannical instinct to obey. The 
earthworm has his digging; the bee her gathering and 
building ; the spider her cunning net-work ; the ant her 
treasury and accounts. All these are comparatively slaves, 
or people of vulgar business. But your fly, free in the air, 
free in the chamber — a black incarnation of caprice — 
wandering, investigating, flitting, flirting, feasting at his 
will, with rich variety of choice in feast, from the heaped 
sweets in the grocer's window to those of the butcher's 
back -yard, and from the galled place on your cab-horse's 
back, to the brown spot in the road, from which, as the 
hoof disturbs him, he rises with angry republican buzz — 
what freedom is like his ? 

149. For captivity, again, perhaps your poor watch- 
dog is as sorrowful a type as you will easily find. Mine 
certainly is. The day is lovely, but I must write this, 
and cannot go out with him. He is chained in the 
yard, because I do not like dogs in rooms, and the gar- 
dener does not like dogs in gardens. He has no books, — 
nothing but his own weary thoughts for company, and a 
group of those free flies, whom he snaps at, with sullen ill 
success. Such dim hope as he may have that I may yet 



15i Tin; qui in OB i in: mi:. 

take him out with me, will be, hour by hour, wearily dia 
appointed; or, worse, darkened at once into a leaden de- 
spair by an authoritative "No" — too well understood. 
IIi> fidelity only seals his fate; if lie would not watch for 
me he would be sent away, and go hunting with some 
happier master: but he watches, and is wise, and faithful, 
and miserable: and his high animal intellect only gives 
him the wistful powers of wonder, and sorrow, and desire, 
and affection, which embitter his captivity. Yet of the 
two, would we rather be watch-dog, or fly ? 

150. Indeed, the first point we have all to determine is 
not how free we are, but wdiat kind of creatures we are. 
It is of small importance to any of us whether we get 
liberty ; but of the greatest that we deserve it. "Whether 
we can win it, fate must determine ; but that we will be 
worthy of it, we may ourselves determine ; and the sor- 
rowfullestr fate, of all that we can suffer, is to have it, 
without deserving it. 

151. I have hardly patience to hold my pen and go on 
writing, as I remember (I would that it were possible for 
a few consecutive instants to forget) the infinite follies of 
modern thought in this matter, centred in the notion that 
liberty is good for a man, irrespectively of the use he is 
likely to make of it. Folly unfathomable ! unspeakable ! 
unendurable to look in the full face of, as the laugh of a 
cretin. You will send your child, will you, into a room 
where the table is loaded with sweet wine and fruit — 
some poisoned, some not ? — you will say to him, " Choose 



ATHENA IN THE HEART. 155 

freely, my little child ! It is so good for you to have free- 
dom of choice : it forms your character — your individu- 
ality ! If you take the wrong cup, or the wrong berry, 
you will die before the day is over, but you will have ac- 
quired the dignity of a Free child % " 

152. You think that puts the case too sharply ? I tell 
you, lover of liberty, there is no choice offered to you, but 
it is similarly between life and death. There is no act, 
nor option of act, possible, but the wrong deed or option 
has poison in it which will stay in your veins thereafter 
for ever. Never more to all eternity can you be as you 
might have .been, had you not done that — chosen that. 
You have " formed your character," forsooth ! No ; if 
you have chosen ill, you have De-formed it, and that for 
ever ! In some choices, it had been better for you that a 
red hot iron bar had struck you aside, scarred and helpless, 
than that you had so chosen. " You will know better 
next time ! " No. Next time will never come. Next 
time the choice will be in quite another aspect — between 
quite different things, : — you, weaker than you were by 
the evil into which you have fallen ; it, more doubtful 
than it was, by the increased dimness of your sight. No 
one ever gets wiser by doing wrong, nor stronger. You 
will get wiser and stronger only by doing right, whether 
forced or not ; the prime, the one need is to do that, under 
whatever compulsion, until you can do it without com- 
pulsion. And then you are a Man. 

153. " What ! " a wayward youth might perhaps answer, 



15G i in: Qi n \ OF i mi: ah:. 

incredulously : " no one ever gets wiser by doing wrong ? 
Shall I not know the world besl by trying the wrong of 
it, and repenting? Have 1 not, even as it Is, Learned 
much by many of my error- '." [ndeed, the effort by 
which partially you recovered yourself was precious ; 
that part of your thought by which you discerned 
the error was precious. What wisdom and strength 
you kept, and rightly used, are rewarded ; and in the pain 
and the repentance, and in the acquaintance with the 
aspects of folly and sin, you have learned something; 
how much less than you would have learned in right 
paths, can never be told, but that it is less is certain. 
Tour liberty of choice has simply destroyed for you so 
much life and strength, never regain able. It is true you 
now know the habits of swine, and the taste of husks : do 
you think your father could not have taught you to know 
better habits and pleasanter tastes, if you had stayed in 
his house ; and that the knowledge you have lost would 
not have been more, as well as sweeter, than that you 
have gained ? But " it so forms my individuality to be 
free ! " Your individuality was given you by God, and 
in your race ; and if you have any to speak of, you will 
want no liberty. You will want a den to work in, and 
peace, and light— no more, — in absolute need; if more, 
in anywise, it will still not be liberty, but direction, in 
struction, reproof, and sympathy. But if you have no 
individuality, if there is no true character nor true desire 
in you, then you will indeed want to be free. You will 



1 



ATHENA IN THE HEAKT. 157 

begin early ; and, as a boy, desire to be a man ; and, as a 
man, think yourself as good as every other. You will 
choose freely to eat, freely to drink, freely to stagger and 
fall, freely, at last, to curse yourself and die. Death is 
the only real freedom possible to us : and that is consum- 
mate freedom,— permission for every particle in the rot- 
ting body to leave its neighbour particle, and shift for 
itself. You call it " corruption " in the flesh ; but before 
it comes to that, all liberty is an equal corruption in mind. 
You ask for freedom of thought ; but if you have not 
sufficient grounds for thought, you have no business to 
think ; and if you have sufficient grounds, you have no 
business to think wrong.. Only one thought is possible to 
you, if you are wise — your liberty is geometrically pro- 
portionate to your folly. 

154. "But all this glory and activity of our age ; what 
are they owing to, but to our freedom of thought? " In 
a measure, they are owing — what good is in them — to the 
discovery of many lies, and the escape from the power of 
evil. Not to liberty, but to the deliverance from evil or 
cruel masters. Brave men have dared to examine lies 
which had long been taught, not because they were free- 
thinkers, but because they were such stern and close 
thinkers that the lie could no' longer escape them. Of 
course the restriction of thought, or of its expression, by 
persecution, is merely a form of violence, justifiable or not, 
as other violence is, according to the character of the per- 
sons against whom it is exercised, and the divine and eter- 



1 ; '^ Tin: QU] EN OF i mi: aii:. 

naJ laws which it vindicates or violates. We must not 
burn a man alive for saying thai the A.thanasian en 
ungrammatical, nor stop a bishop's salary because \\ 
getting the worst of an argument with him; neither must 
we let drunken men howl in the public streets at night. 
There is mueh that is true in the pari of Mr. Mill'.- essay 
on Liberty which treats of freedom of thought ; some im- 
portant truths are there beautifully expressed, but many, 
quite vital, are omitted; and the balance, therefore, is 
wrongly struck. The liberty of expression, with a great 
nation, would become like that in a well-educated company, 
in which there is indeed freedom of speech, but not of 
clamour; or like that in an orderly senate, in which men 
who deserve to be heard, are heard in due time, and under 
determined restrictions. The degree of liberty you can 
rightly grant to a number of men is in the inverse ratio of 
their desire for it ; and a general hush, or call to order, 
would be often very desirable in this England of ours. For 
the rest, of any good or evil extant, it is impossible to say 
what measure is owing to restraint, and what to licence 
where the right is balanced between them. I was not a 
little provoked one day, a summer or two since, in Scot- 
land, because the Duke of Athol hindered me from exam- 
ining the gneiss and slate junctions in Glen Tilt, at the 
hour convenient to me; but I saw them at last, and in 
quietness; and to the very restriction that annoyed me, 
owed, probably, the fact of their being in existence, instead 
of being blasted away by a mob-company ; while the 



[ 



ATHENA IN THE HEART. 159 

" free " paths and inlets of Loch Katrine and the Lake of 
Geneva are for ever trampled down and destroyed, not by 
one duke, bat by tens of thousands of ignorant tyrants. 

155. So, a Dean and Chapter may, perhaps, unjustifia- 
bly charge me twopence for seeing a cathedral ; — but your 
free mob pulls spire and all down about my ears, and I can 
see it no more for ever. And even if I cannot get up to 
the granite junctions in the glen, the stream comes down 
from them pure to the Garry ; but in Beddington Park I 
am stopped by the newly erected fence of a building spec- 
ulator ; and the bright Wandel, divine of waters as Cas- 
taly, is filled by the free public with old shoes, obscene 
crockery, and ashes. 

156. In fine, the arguments for liberty may in general 
be summed in a few very simple forms, as follows : — 

Misguiding is mischievous : therefore guiding is. 

If the blind lead the blind, both fall into the ditch : 
therefore, nobody should lead anybody. 

Lambs and fawns should be left free in the fields; 
much more bears and wolves. 

If a man's gun and shot are his own, he may fire in 
any direction he pleases. 

A fence across a road is inconvenient ; much more one 
at the side of it. 

Babes should not be swaddled with their hands bound 
down to their sides : therefore they should be thrown out 
to roll in the kennels naked. 

None of these arguments are good, and the practical 



1G0 THE QUEEN "l THE AIR. 

issues of them are worse. For there are certain eternal 
laws for human conduct which are quite clearly discern- 
ible by human reason. So far as these arc discovered and 
obeyed, by whatever machinery or authority the obedi- 
ence is procured, there follow life and strength. So far 
as they are disobeyed, by whatever good intention the 
disobedience is brought about, there follow ruin and sor- 
row. And the first duty of every man in the world i< 
to find his true master, and, for his own good, submit to 
him; and to find his true inferior, and, for that inferior's 
good, conquer him. The punishment is sure, if we either 
refuse the reverence, or are too cowardly and indolent 
to enforce the compulsion. A base nation crucifies or 
poisons its wise men, and lets its fools rave and rot in 
its streets. A wise nation obeys the one, restrains the 
other, and cherishes all. 

157. The best examples of the results of wise normal 
discipline in Art will be found in whatever evidence re- 
mains respecting the lives of great Italian painters, * 
though, unhappily, in eras of progress, but just in pro- 
portion to the admirableness and efficiency of the life, 
will be usually the scantiness of its history. The indi- 
vidualities and liberties which are causes of destruction 
may be recorded ; but the loyal conditions of daily 
breath are never told. Because Leonardo made models 
of machines, dug canals, built fortifications, and dissi- 
pated half his art-power in capricious ingenuities, we 
have many anecdotes of him ; — but no picture of impor- 



ATHENA IN THE HEART, 161 

tance on canvas, and only a few withered stains of one 
upon a wall. But because his pupil, or reputed pupil, 
Luini, laboured in constant and successful simplicity, we 
have no anecdotes of him ; — only hundreds of noble 
works. Luini is, perhaps, the best central type of the 
highly-trained Italian painter. He is the only man who 
entirely united the religious temper which was the spirit- 
life of art, with the physical power which was its bodily 
life. He joins the purity and passion of Angelico to the 
strength of Veronese : the two elements, poised in perfect 
balance, are so calmed and restrained, each by the other, 
that most of us lose the sense of both. The artist does 
not see the strength, by reason of the chastened spirit in 
which, it is used; and the religious visionary does not 
recognize the passion, by reason of the frank human 
truth with which it is rendered. He is a man ten times 
greater than Leonardo ; — a mighty colourist, while Leo- 
nardo was only a fine draughtsman in black, staining the 
chiaroscuro drawing, like a coloured print : he perceived 
and rendered the delicatest types of human beauty that 
have been painted since the days of the Greeks, while 
Leonardo depraved his finer instincts by caricature, and 
remained to the end of his days the slave of an archaic 
smile : and he is a designer as frank, instinctive, and ex- 
haustless as Tintoret, while Leonardo's design is only an 
agony of science, admired chiefly because it is painful, 
and capable of analysis in its best accomplishment. 
Luini has left nothing behind him that is not lovely ; but 



162 the Qi i in OF i in: aii:. 

of his life I believe hardly anything is known beyond 
remnants of tradition which murmur about Lugano and 
Saronno, and which remain nngleaned. This only is cer- 
tain, that lie was born in the loveliest district of North 
Italy, where lulls, and streams, and air, meet in softest 
harmonies. Child of the Alps, and of their divinest 
lake, he is taught, without doubt or dismay, a lofty re- 
ligious creed, and a sufficient law of life, and of its 
mechanical arts. Whether lessoned by Leonardo him- 
self, or merely one of many, disciplined in the system of 
the Milanese school, he learns unerringly to draw, un- 
erringly and enduringly to paint. His tasks are set him 
without question day by day, by men who are justly 
satisfied with his work, and who accept it without any 
harmful praise, or senseless blame. Place, scale, and 
subject are determined for him on the cloister wall or 
the church dome; as he is required, and for sufficient 
daily bread, and little more, he paints what he has been 
taught to design wisely, and has passion to realize glo- 
riously : every touch he lays is eternal, every thought he 
conceives is beautiful and pure : his hand moves always 
in radiance of blessing ; from day to day his life enlarges 
in power-and peace; it passes away cloudlessly, the starry 
twilight remaining arched far against the night. 

158. Oppose to such a life as this that of a great. 
painter amidst the elements of modern English liberty. 
Take the life of Turner, in whom the artistic energy and 
inherent love of beauty were at least as strong as in 



ATHENA IN THE HEART. 163 

Luini : but, amidst the disorder and ghastliness of the 
lower streets of London, his instincts in early infancy 
were warped into toleration of evil, or even into delight 
in it. He gathers what he can of instruction by ques- 
tioning and prying among half-informed masters ; spells 
out some knowledge of classical fable; educates himself, 
by an admirable force, to the production of wildly ma- 
jestic or pathetically tender and pure pictures, by which 
he cannot live. There is no one to judge them, or to 
command him : only some of the English upper classes 
hire him to paint their houses and parks, and destroy 
the drawings afterwards by the most wanton neglect. 
Tired of labouring carefully, without either reward or 
praise, he dashes .out into various experimental and 
popular works — makes himself the servant of the lower 
public, and is dragged hither and thither at their will; 
while yet, helpless and guideless, he indulges his idiosyn- 
crasies till they change into insanities ; the strength of 
his soul increasing its sufferings, and giving force to its 
errors ; all the purpose of life degenerating into instinct ; 
and the web of his work wrought, at last, of beauties too 
subtle to be understood, his liberty, with vices too singu- 
lar to be forgiven — all useless, because magnificent idio- 
syncrasy had become solitude, or contention, in the midst 
of a reckless populace, instead of submitting itself in 
loyal harmony to the Art-laws of an understanding na- 
tion. And the life passed away in darkness; and its 
final work, in all the best beauty of it, has already 



164 1 ill'. QTJEl \ OT I in: All:. 

perished, only enough remaining to teach us what we 
have lost. 

159. These arc the opposite effects of Law and of Lib- 
erty "ii men of the highest powers. In the case of infe- 
riors the contrast is still more fatal : under strict law, they 
become the subordinate workers in great schools, healthily 
aiding, echoing, or supplying, with multitudinous force of 
hand, the mind of the leading masters : they are the name- 
less carvers of great architecture — stainers of glass — ham- 
merers of iron — helpful scholars, whose work ranks round, 
if not with, their master's, and never disgraces it. But the 
inferiors under a system of licence for the most part perish 
in miserable effort ;* a few struggle into pernicious emi- 

* As I correct this sheet for press, my Pall Mall Gazette of last Satur- 
day, April 17th, is lying on the table by me. I print a few lines out of 
it:— 

"An Artist's Death. — A sad story was told at an inquest held in 
St. Pancras last night by Dr. Lankester on the body of * * *, aged 
fifty -nine, a French artist, who was found dead in his bed at his rooms 
in * * * Street. M. * * *, also an artist, said he had known the de- 
ceased for fifteen years. He once held a high position, and being anx- 
ious to make a name in the world, he five years ago commenced a large 
picture, which he hoped, when completed, to have in the gallery at Ver- 
sailles ; and with that view he sent a photograph of it to the French 
Emperor. He also had an idea of sending it to the English Royal Acad- 
emy. He laboured on this picture, neglecting other work which would 
have paid him well, and gradually sank lower and lower into poverty. 
His friends assisted him, but being absorbed in his great work, he did 
not heed their advice, and they left him. He was, however, assisted 
by the French Ambassador, and last Saturday he (the witness) saw de- 



ATHENA EST THE HEART. 165 

nence— harmful alike to themselves and to all' who admire 
them ; many die of starvation ; many insane, either in weak- 
ness of insolent egotism, like Hay don, or in a conscientious 
agony of beautiful purpose and warped power, like Blake. 
There is no probability of the persistence of a licentious 
school in any good accidentally discovered by them ; there 
is an approximate certainty of their gathering, with ac- 
claim, round any shadow of evil, and following it to what- 
ever quarter of destruction it may lead. 

160. Thus far the notes on Freedom. !Now, lastly, here 
is some talk which I tried at the time to make intelligible ; 
and with which I close this volume, because it will serve 
sufficiently to express the practical relation in which I 
think the art and imagination of the Greeks stand to our 
own ; and will show the reader that my view of that rela- 
tion is unchanged, from the first day on which I began to 
write, until now. 

ceased, who was much depressed in spirits, as lie expected the brokers 
to be put in possession for rent. He said his troubles were so great that 
he feared his brain would give way. The witness gave him a shilling, 
for which he appeared very thankful. On Monday the witness called 
"upon him, but received no answer to his knock. He went again on 
Tuesday, and entered the deceased's bedroom and found him dead. Dr. 
George Ross said that when called in to the deceased he had been dead 
at least two days. The room was in a filthy dirty condition, and the 
picture referred to — certainly a very fine one— was in that room. The 
post-mortem examination shewed that the cause of death was fatty de- 
generation of the heart, the latter probably having ceased its action 
through the mental excitement of the deceased." 



166 the queen of the air. 

The Hercules of Camarina. 

Address to the Students of the Art School of South Lambeth, 
March 15th, 18G9. 

161. A.\MXG the photographs of Greek coins which pre- 
sent so many admirable subjects for your study, I must 
speak for the present of one only: the Hercules of Caina- 
rina. You have, represented by a Greek workman, in that 
coin, the face of a man, and the skin of a lion's head. And 
the man's face is like a man's face, but the lion's skin is 
not like a lion's skin. 

162. Now there are some people who will tell you that 
Greek art is fine, because it is true ; and because it carves 
men's faces as like men's faces as it can. 

And there are other people who will tell you that Greek 
art is fine because it is not true ; and carves a lion's skin 
so as to look not at all like a lion's skin. 

And you fancy that one or other of these sets of people 
must be wrong, and are perhaps much puzzled to find out 
which you should believe. 

But neither of them are, wrong, and you will have eventu- 
ally to believe, or rather to understand and know, in recon- 
ciliation, the truths taught by each ; — but for the present, 
the teachers of the first group are those you must follow. 

It is they who tell you the deepest and usefullest truth, 
which involves all others in time. Greek art, and all 
other a?'t, is fine when it makes a mail's face as like a 
'mail's face as it can. Hold to that. All kinds of non- 



ATHENA IN THE HEART. 167 

sense are talked to yon, now-a-days, ingeniously and irre- 
levantly about art. Therefore, for the most part of the 
day, shut your ears, and keep your eyes open : and under- 
stand primarily, what you may, I fancy, understand easily, 
that the greatest masters of all greatest schools — Phidias, 
Donatello, Titian, Velasquez, or Sir Joshua Reynolds— all 
tried to make human creatures as like human creatures as 
they could ; and that anything less like humanity than 
their work, is not so good as theirs. 

Get that well driven into your heads ; and don't let it 
out again, at your peril. 

163. Having got it well in, you may then farther un- 
derstand, safely, that there is a great deal of secondary 
work in pots, and pans, and floors, and carpets, and 
shawls, and architectural ornament, which ought, essen- 
tially, to be unlike reality, and to depend for its charm on 
quite other qualities than imitative ones. But all such 
art is inferior and secondary — much of it more or less 
instinctive and animal, and a civilized human creature 
can only learn its principles rightly, by knowing those of 
great civilized art first — which is always the representa- 
tion, to the utmost of its power of whatever it has got to 
show — made to look as like the thing as possible. Go 
into the National Gallery, and look at the foot of Correg- 
gio's Yenus there. Correggio made it as like a foot as he 
could, and you won't easily find anything liker. Now, 
you will find on any Greek vase something meant for a 
foot, or a hand, which is not at all like one. The Greek 



168 THE QUEEN OB THE All:. 

vase is a g 1 tiling in its way, Imt Correggio's picture is 

the best work. 

h'l. So*, again, go into the Turner room of the Na- 
tional Gallery, and look at Turner's drawing of "Ivy 
Bridge." You will find the water in it is like real water, 
and the ducks in it are like real ducks. Then go into the 
British Museum, and look for an Egyptian landscape, and 
you will find the water in that constituted of blue zig- 
zags, not at all like water ; and ducks in the middle of it 
made of red lines, looking not in the least as if they could 
stand stuffing with sage and onions. They are very good 
in their way, but Turner's are better. 

165. I will not pause to fence my general principle 
against what you perfectly well know of the due contra- 
diction, — that a thing may be painted very like, yet 
painted ill. Rest content with knowing that it must be 
like, if it is painted well; and take this farther general 
law : — Imitation is like charity. When it is done for love 
it is lovely ; when it is done for show, hateful. 

166. Well, then, this Greek coin is fine, first, because 
the face is like a face. Perhaps you think there is some- 
thing particularly handsome in the face, which you can't 
see in the photograph, or can't at present appreciate. 
But there is nothing of the kind. It is a very regular, 
quiet, commonplace sort of face ; and any average Eng- 
lish gentleman's, of good descent, would be far hand- 
somer. 

167. Fix that in your heads also, therefore, that Greek 



ATHENA EST THE HEART. 169 

faces are not particularly beautiful. Of the much non- 
sense against which you are to keep your ears shut, that 
which is talked to you of the Greek, ideal of beauty, is 
among the absolutest. There is not a single instance of a 
very beautiful head left by the highest school of Greek 
art. On coins, there is even no approximately beautiful 
one. The Juno of Argos is a virago ; the Athena of 
Athens grotesque ; the Athena of Corinth is insipid ; and 
of Thurium, sensual. The Siren Ligeia, and fountain of 
Arethusa, on the coins of Terina and Syracuse, are pret- 
tier, but totally without expression, and chiefly set off by 
their well-curled hair. You might have expected some- 
thing subtle in Mercuries ; but the Mercury of JEnus is a 
very stupid-looking fellow, in a cap like a bowl, with a 
knob on the top of it. The Bacchus of Thasos is a dray- 
man with his hair pomatum'd. The Jupiter of Syracuse 
is, however, calm and refined ; and the Apollo of Clazo- 
menge would have been impressive, if he had not come 
down to us much flattened by friction. But on the whole, 
the merit of Greek coins does not primarily depend on 
beauty of features, nor even, in the period of highest art, 
that of the statues. You may take the Yenus of Melos as 
a standard of beauty of the central Greek type. She has 
tranquil, regular, and lofty features ; but could not hold 
her own for a moment against the beauty of a simple 
English girl, of pure race and kind heart. 

168. And the reason that Greek art, on the whole, 
bores you, (and you know it does.) is that you are always 



170 THE QUEEN 01 THE All;. 

forced to look in it for something that is not there; but 
wliich may be seen every day, in real life, all round yon; 
and which you are naturally disposed to delight in, and 
ought t<» delight in. For the Greek race was not at all 
one of exalted beauty, but only of general and healthy 
completeness of form. They were only, and could be 
only, beautiful in body to the degree that they were beau- 
tiful in soul; (for you will find, when you read deeply into 
the matter, that the body is only the soul made visible). 
And the Greeks were indeed very good people, much 
better people than most of us think, or than many of us 
are ; but there are better people alive now than the best 
of them, and lovelier people to be seen now, than the 
loveliest of them. 

169. Then, -what are the merits of this Greek art, which 
make it so exemplary for you ? Well, not that it is beau- 
tiful, but that it is Right.* All that it desires to do, it 
does, and all that it does, does well. You will find, as 
you advance in the knowledge of art, that its laws of self- 
restraint are very marvellous; that its peace of heart, and 
contentment in doing a simple thing, with only one or 
two qualities, restrictedly desired, and sufficiently attain- 
ed, are a most wholesome element of education for you, 
as opposed to the wild writhing, and wrestling, and long- 
ing for the moon, and tilting at windmills, and agony of 
eyes, and torturing of fingers, and general spinning out 
of one's soul into fiddlestrings, which constitute the ideal 
life of a modern artist. 

* Compare above, § 101. 



ATHENA EST THE HEART. 171 

Also observe, there is entire masterhood of its business np 
to the required point. A Greek does not reach after other 
people's strength, nor out-reach his own. He never tries 
to paint before he can draw ; he never tries to lay on flesh 
where there are no bones ; and he never expects to find the 
bones of anything in his inner consciousness. Those are 
his first merits — sincere and innocent purpose, strong com- 
mon sense and principle, and all the strength that comes 
of these, and all the grace that follows on that strength. 

170. But, secondly, Greek art is always exemplary in 
disposition of masses, which is a thing that in modern days 
students rarely look for, artists not enough, and the public 
never. But, whatever else Greek work may fail of, you 
may be always sure its masses are well placed, and their 
placing has been the object of the most subtle care. Look, 
for instance, at the inscription in front of this Hercules of 
the name of the town — Camarina. You can't read it, even 
though you may know Greek, without some pains ; for the 
sculptor knew well enough that it mattered very little 
whether you read it or not, for the Camarina Hercules 
could tell his own story ; but what did above all things 
matter was, that no K or A or M should come in a wrong 
place with respect to the outline of the head, and divert 
the eye from it, or spoil any of its lines. So the whole 
inscription is thrown into a sweeping curve of gradually 
diminishing size, continuing from the lion's paws, round 
the neck, up to the forehead, and answering a decorative 
purpose as completely as the curls of the mane opposite. 



L72 THE Mil. A IK. 

Of these, again, yon cannot change or displace one with- 
cut mischief: they are alinosl as even in reticulation as a 
piece of basket-work; but each has a different form and a 
due relation to the rest, and if you set to work to draw 
that mane rightly, you will find that, whatever time yoti 
give to it, you can't get the tresses quite into their places, 
and that every tress out of its place does an injury. It' you 
■want to test your powers of accurate drawing, you maj 
make that lion's mane jour pons asinorum. I have nevei 
yet met with a student who didn't make an ass in a lion's 
skin of himself, when he tried it. 

171. Granted, however, that these tresses may be finely 
placed, still the} r are not like a lion's mane. So we come 
back to the question, — if the face is to belike a man's face, 
why is not the lion's mane to be like a lion's mane? Well, 
because it can't be like a lion's mane without too much 
trouble ; — and inconvenience after that, and poor success, 
after all. Too much trouble, in cutting the die into fine 
fringes and . jags ; inconvenience after that, — because 
fringes and jags would spoil the surface of a coin ; poor 
success after all, — because, though you can easily stamp 
cheeks and foreheads smooth at a blow, you can't stamp 
projecting tresses fine at a blow, whatever pains you take 
with your die. 

So your Greek uses his common sense, wastes no 
time, loses no skill, and says to you, " Here are beau- 
tifully set tresses, which I have carefully designed and 
easily stamped. Enjoy them ; and if you cannot un« 



ATHENA EST TEE HEART. 173 

derstand that they mean lion's mane, heaven mend your 
wits." 

172. See then, yon have in this work, well-founded 
knowledge, simple and right aims, thorough mastery of 
handicraft, splendid invention in arrangement, unerring 
common sense in treatment, — merits, these, I think, ex- 
emplary enough to justify our tormenting you a little with 
Greek Art. But it has one merit more than these,, the 
greatest of all. It always means something worth saying. 
Not merely worth saying for that time only, but for all 
time. "What do you think this helmet of lion's hide is al- 
ways given to Hercules for ? You can't suppose it means 
only that he once killed a lion, and always carried its skin 
afterwards to show that he had, as Indian sportsmen send 
home stuffed rugs, with claws at the corners, and a lump 
in the middle which one tumbles over every time one stirs 
the fire. What was this JSTemean Lion, whose spoils were 
evermore to cover Hercules from the cold ? Not merely 
a large specimen ofFelis Leo, ranging the fields of ISTemea, 
be sure of that. This Nemean cub was one of a bad lit- 
ter. Born of Typhon and Echidna, — of the whirlwind 
and the snake, — Cerberus his brother, the Hydra of Lerna 
his sister,— it must have been difficult to get his hide off 
him. He had to be found in darkness too, and dealt upon 
without weapons, by grip at the throat — arrows and club 
of no avail against him. What dpes all that mean ? 

173. It means that the Nemean Lion is the first great 
adversary of life, whatever that may be — to Hercules, or 



1 74 iii i '.'i sen 0] i li i: aiu. 

toany of as, then or now. The first monster we have to 
strangle, or be destroyed by, fighting in the dark, and with 
none to help us, only Athena standing by, to encourago 
with her smile. Every man's Nemean Lion lies in wail 
for him somewhere. The slothful man says, there is a lion 
in the path. He says well. The quiet wnslothful man 
says the same, and knows it too. But they differ in their 
farther reading of the text. The slothful man says I shall 
be slain, and the unslothful, it shall he. It is the first 
ugly and strong enemy that rises against us, all future 
victory depending on victory over that. Kill it ; and 
through all the rest of life, what was once dreadful is your 
armour and you are clothed with that conquest for every 
other, and helmed with its crest of fortitude for evermore. 

Alas, we have most of us to walk bare-headed; but that 
is the meaning of the story of Kemea, — worth laying to 
heart and thinking of, sometimes, when you see a dish 
garnished with parsley, which was the crown at the Ke- 
rn e an games. 

174. How far, then, have we got, in our list of the 
merits of Greek art now ? 

Sound knowledge. 

Simple aims. 

Mastered craft. 

Vivid invention. 

Strong commoji sense. 

And eternally true and wise meaning. 

Are these not enough? Here is one more then, which 



ATHENA IN THE HEART. 175 

will find favour, I should think, with the British Lion. 
Greek art is never frightened at anything, it is always 
cool. 

175. It differs essentially from all other art, past or 
present, in- this incapability of being frightened. Half 
the power and imagination of every other school depend 
on a certain feverish terror mingling with their sens© of 
beauty ; — the feeling that a child has in a dark room, or a 
sick person in seeing ugly dreams. But the Greeks never 
have ugly dreams. They cannot draw anything ugly 
when they try. Sometimes they put themselves to their 
wits'-end to draw an ugly thing, — the Medusa's head, for 
instance, — but they can't do it, — not they, — because noth- 
ing frightens them. They widen the mouth, and grind 
the teeth, and puff the cheeks, and set the eyes a-gog- 
gling ; and the thing is only ridiculous after all, not the 
least dreadful, for there is no dread in their hearts. Pen- 
si veness; amazement; often deepest grief and desolate- 
ness. All these ; but terror never. Everlasting calm in 
the presence of all fate ; and joy such as they could win, 
not indeed in a perfect beauty, but in beauty at perfect 
rest ! A kind of art this, surely, to be looked at, and 
thought upon sometimes with profit, even in these latter 
days. 

176. To be looked at sometimes. Not continually, 
and never as a model for imitation. For you are not 
Greeks ; but, for better or worse, English creatures ; and 
cannot do, even if it were a thousand times better worth 



176 i in; Ql i i x OF mi. aik. 

doing, anything well, except what your English hearts 
shall prompt, and ywiir.Kn--li.-li skies teach you. For all 
good art is the natural utterance of its own people in its 
own day. 

Hut also, your own art is a better and brig-liter one than 
ever this Greek art was. Many motives powers, and in- 
sights have been added to those elder ones. The very 
eorruptions into which we have fallen are signs of a 
subtle life, higher than theirs was, and therefore more 
fearful in its faults and death. Christianity lias neither 
superseded, nor, by itself, excelled heathenism ; but it lias 
added its own good, won also by many a Nemean contest 
in dark valleys, to all that was good and noble in hea- 
thenism : and our present thoughts and work, when they 
are right, are nobler than the heathen's. And we are not 
reverent enough to them, because we possess too much 
of them. That sketch of four cherub heads from an 
English girl, by Sir Joshua Eeynolds, at Kensington, 
is au incomparably finer thing than ever the Greeks 
did. Ineffably tender in the touch, yet Herculean in 
power; innocent, yet exalted in feeling; pure in colour 
as a pearl; reserved and decisive in design, as this Lion 
crest, — if it alone existed of such,— if it were a picture by 
Zeuxis, the only one left in the world, and you built 
a shrine for it, and were allowed to see it only seven days 
in a year, it alone would teach you all of art that you 
ever needed to know. But you do not learn from this 
or any other such work, because you have not reverence 



ATHENA IN THE' HEART. 177 

enough for them, and are trying to learn from all at once, 
and from a hundred other masters besides. 

177. Here, then, is the practical advice which I would 
venture to deduce from what I have tried to show you. 
Use Greek art as a first, not a final, teacher. Learn to 
draw carefully from Greek work ; above all, to place 
forms correctly, and to use light and shade tenderly. 
Never allow yourselves black shadows. It is easy to make 
things look round and projecting ; but the things to exer- 
cise yourselves in are the placing of the masses, and the 
modelling of the lights. It is an admirable exercise to 
take a pale wash of colour for all the shadows, never 
reinforcing it everywhere, but drawing the statue as if 
it were in far distance, making all the darks one flat pale 
tint. Then model from those into the lights, rounding as 
well as you can, on those subtle conditions. In your 
chalk drawings, separate the lights from the darks at once 
all over.; then reinforce the darks slightly where abso- 
lutely necessary, and put your whole strength on the 
lights and . their limits. Then, when you have learned 
to draw thoroughly, take one master for your painting, 
as you would have done necessarily in old times by being 
put into his school (were I to choose for you, it should 
be among six men only — Titian, Correggio, Paul Veron- 
ese, Yelasquez, Reynolds, or Holbein). If you are a 
landscapist, Turner must be your only guide, (for no 
other great landscape painter has yet lived); and having 
chosen, do your best to understand your own chosen 



178 the Qi i:kn of tiie air. 

master, and obey Jum, and no one else, till you have 
strength to deal with the nature itself round you, and 
then, be your own master, and see with your own eyes. 
If you have got masterhood or sight in you, that is the 
way to make the most of them; and if you have neither, 
you will at least be sound in your work, prevented from 
immodest and useless effort, and protected from vulgar 
and fantastic error. 

And so I wish you all, good speed, and the favour 
of Hercules and of the Muses; and to those who shall 
best deserve them, the crown of Parsley first, and then 
of the Laurel. 



THE END. 



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